If you think "performance" means primarily number crunching, not gaming, then go with the AMD choice, but just use the integrated Radeon 4290 graphics on the ASUS motherboard and save yourself over $300 by dumping the GPU card. Not to mention that if you can get by with a 19" monitor, there are several to be had for like $150 or less (Fry's actually has a 23" for $200 before rebate, too), etc. Oh, if you dump the graphics card, you probably can get by with a smaller PS, too, and that will save more... And honestly, doesn't that retail Phenom II come with a stock cooler? Knock another $27 off...
85.000 PhP !? That’s almost 290.000 Nigerian naira! The average nigerian would have to work two full years to be able to afford this system! Preposterous. I demand this guide to be renamed into "System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Super Computer".
I'm just putting this here so it hopefully doesn't get lost in the discussion below. You'll note that I added a paragraph on the "Base Components" page discussing the SSD/Blu-ray debate and making specific note of the option to downgrade one and upgrade the other. I sort of take that thing as a given, but obviously a lot of you want us to explicitly mention stuff like that.
You struck a nerve by pissing on their "requirement" to have SSDs in any modern system. Now we know why GullLars has been such a prick over here. Of course if you're into competitive benchmarking, SSDs will help out. PCMark Vantage is a fucking joke the way it boosts your scores just by putting in an SSD. "Oh wow... my gaming score got 100% higher by using an SSD!" NOT!
Maybe everyone from AnandTech should go over there and piss in their forums for a while? Except, I know from being around here quite a while that the people here are of much higher caliber material than the idiot ORB-Penis worshipers at XtremeSystems.
So GullLars and pals, if you come back again, let me wish you a fine PISS OFF. Someone posts an informed guide that doesn't cater to your every whim by recommending a $200+ upgrade to a reasonable SSD and you tell people to come over here and complain. Real nice. And you can forget that 32GB SSD garbage... just my Windows and Program Files directories use up 20GB, and I don't have a ton of stuff installed! I doubt most mainstream users want to deal with telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry application to put files somewhere other than C:. I still spend 10 minutes on every tech support call trying to get people to open Windows Explorer and browse to a specific location. Those that know how to deal with multiple HDDs, changing user documents default location, etc. are more than capable of determining on their own whether or not they need an SSD without you pushing them as the be-all, end-all of computer performance.
To those who complain: Before you post in a renowned place such as anandtech, make sure you know what you are talking about. You obviously have NO idea.
This is a HARDWARE website not a MONEY website... Need more clarity? Ok then, Performance midrange means that in terms of the currently available hardware this guide hits the sweetspot between PERFORMANCE and cost.
If you still don't understand, I'd recommend you go buy yourself a Dell.
And to isrial: You can't make such demands, this is still a free country the last time I checked, your demands are reflecting poorly on your country mugu.
1. I absolutely agree that this is NOT a midrange pc, but that it is high end. You can play (almost) any game at its maximum with that config, how can you call that midrange? 2 . Please make up your mind internally, about ssd's: "Though the time for suggesting the purchase of an SSD boot/OS disk in this segment appears to be drawing closer, prices just aren’t there yet." And that's it in this article, while over a year ago:
I still believe that a SSD is the single most effective performance upgrade you can do to your PC; even while taking this behavior into account. While personally I wouldn’t give up a SSD in any of my machines, I can understand the hesitation in investing a great deal of money in one today.
@ The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ @ 3/18/2009
And even later explicitly: Title: Why You Absolutely Need an SSD The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD @ 8/30/2009
Over half a year ago you absolutely needed an SSD and now all of sudden the time isn't just there yet? And on the other hand, you do put an Blu-ray player in it.
In general I really do like the articles on Anandtech, but personally I think this one is a swing and miss.
The old "my midrange is not your midrange" argument rears its ugly head again. The classification is technically "Performance Midrange", which means it's closer to high-end than entry-level (as opposed to Entry Midrange, or Mainstream, or whatever you want to call it). You can, as someone above pointed out, make many changes--quite a few of which we mention in the text--to get the price lower.
As for the SSDs, Anand loves them. He also loves Macs. And he happens to have far more available spending money than the vast majority of people... plus he gets them for free. Personally, I've used systems with and without SSDs and I don't feel the difference as much as Anand. For $100 I can get a 1TB hard drive. For the same $100 I can get a dumbed down 30GB or 40GB SSD. It will handle random file access a lot better, but you will fill up a big chunk of it with just your OS and Office.
Personally, I am fine having all of my documents, images, movies, etc. reside in C:\Users\Jarred. At present (and with much of my pre-2009 data moved to backup on a different drive), my user folder checks in at nearly 60GB of data. 12GB is just for the 2009/2010 AnandTech stuff, and another 12GB or so is for family pictures. I could store it in a different location, but I prefer not to as I like being able to open Explorer and get straight to my pictures with the link in the top-left.
Is Anand wrong? Nope. And neither am I. It's merely a case of different priorities. For the cost of a reasonable sized SSD (160GB is the smallest I'd be okay with), I can get a lot of other performance upgrades that will matter more to me.
Thanks for the quick reaction. But when you state that you don't feel the difference that much, then I can hardly imagine that you can actually feel the difference between the WD black and other 1TB HD's. Which makes it hard to justify going for the faster WD Black.
That's only $23 extra with extra GPU performance. The only thing your missing is the blu-ray. Well, that's my point of view. I think most people don't need a blu-ray player in their computer, I even don't get the point of having one. If you want to watch a blu-ray movie, you'll do it on your tv.
As for the SSDs, Anand loves them. He also loves Macs. And he happens to have far more available spending money than the vast majority of people... plus he gets them for free. Personally, I've used systems with and without SSDs and I don't feel the difference as much as Anand. For $100 I can get a 1TB hard drive. For the same $100 I can get a dumbed down 30GB or 40GB SSD. It will handle random file access a lot better, but you will fill up a big chunk of it with just your OS and Office.
Logical fail; strawman argument.
The motherboard on either setup has 6 SATA ports, not 1. You are not limited to using 1 storage device. Also, most users that watch BluRay films has either a PS3/xbox360 or a BluRay player. Choosing a BD player over an SSD for this build makes me want to go /wallbash
I would also like to correct you on another point. Windows 7 64Bit proffesional edition with all updates and security essentials + MS office + Open office + Firefox + Burning program and most other _core apps_ will take up roughly 16GB once pagefile and hibernation is deactivated (or pagefile reduced to a few hundred MBs). Adding the full CS4 suite, a music editing program, 3DS max, and a couple of other apps will still leave you around the 30GB mark.
It's not much trouble at all to set up W7 to have OS + Apps on a SSD, and have a 1TB(+) HDD for all media, games, and others. Configuring "libraries" takes 1 minute and is easy to do. I've made libraries on a partition _NOT C:_ for: Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents, and Downloads on all computers i've set up. Running Ccleaner once a week keeps you from building up temp files on C, and restricting system restore to using 1-2GB will keep it from inflating over time.
Accusing Jarred of using straw man: EPIC fail! Accusing your opponent of using a straw man in order to pretend he didn't say anything useful on the other hand happens to be a form of the straw man argument, so congratulations!
Now, where did he misrepresent someone's position in order to knock it down and thereby make his position stronger? All I can see is that he said Anand loves SSDs. He gave examples of other things where he may not agree like Macs. He points out that SSDs cost a lot of money. Where is the attempt to refute something without actually refuting it?
Elsewhere, Jarred admits that the Blu-ray is unnecessary, and the article text now reflects this. So get off the damn high horse and quit bitching and moaning about what amounts to a difference of opinion. Sheesh!
The strawman part was representing SSD as a replacement for a HDD and arguing that it's too low capacity and too expensive. The case you want to use an SSD in the majority of cases in is an addition to a HDD. Then capacity demands are way low, and the price pr GB can easily be justified because of the system acceleration effect.
What part of his explanation of wanting to keep all of his files in the same place did you not understand? Go make your own damned buyer's guide if you are having so much trouble accepting or understanding this one.
I understand he wants that, but it's not an argument against an SSD as a system drive. You could simply move all documents to the harddisk, and have them in one place there.
I'm not looking for a flamewar here, but i don't like it when people misrepresent the uses of SSDs. The number one reason to use an SSD is system and application acceleration, not storage. The reasonable capacity range for that starts around 32GB, at wich point you will fit the entire OS and quite a bit more. Not being able to put everything you might want on it, and therefore ruling it out, denies you the benefits the stuff that would fit would get.
While he explains his preference, it's still his own personal preference. A good reviewer should look beyond that. SSD's are becoming more and more populair and i understand why. More populair then Blueray drives, but, aldo he admits it is not a dealmaker; the Blueray player is chosen in the configuration. WHY?
The WD Black 1TB i can understand, WD Black series come with a 5 year warranty. That's a good argument to pay a little extra.
You can pretty easily have it set up so the \users folder is located on another drive with it behaving exactly is it currently does. It`s how my computer is set up in fact.
You guys are dumb. There is more than one way a system can be mid-range. This PC is midrange performance-wise...not money-wise. Don't be stupid. Use your brain. And if you make less than a thousand dollars a year....move.
Excuse me?! This system has quite top-notch performance. I'll quote myself: "You can play (almost) any game at its maximum with that config, how can you call that midrange?" A system of 900 is low-range to you then? That makes no sense at all.
Flip that around, what would you call a system with a 980X and multiple Fermi GPUs if this is high-end? I suppose you could call this the bottom of high-end, upper-midrange or lower high-end is really semantics.
I wonder why they keep saying the i5-750 is faster than the i7-920 in most benchmarks when Bench shows the opposite.
So a Porsche 911 Turbo S is midrange because there happens to be a Bugatti Veyron that costs more than 10 times as much? In my opinion, midrange is the "typical" range. What the average person would buy. Low end is below that, high end is above that. This is not something the average person would buy. But this argument is actually quite irrelevant, imho. You can't "prove" that something is mid-range, that depends on personal factors. I repeat, I was just stating that it was my opinion that this is rather high-end.
You can go so many routes with a $1000 to $1750 build, and whichever route you go and whatever you call it, it's still a $1000 to $1750 build. For the price and for a complete system, I'm very comfortable with the recommended components. If you don't want Blu-ray, I assume you're all plenty smart and can manage to not add the Blu-ray drive and--GASP!--even put a DVD-RW in its place. I figure the same goes for the GPU, storage, case, keyboard, mouse, and LCD. All of those are literally drop-in replacements, and we have plenty of other articles reviewing things like SSDs for the interested.
In my opinion, the biggest decision in any build really comes down to the choice of motherboard. That's the one where you have to really think about what you want and what you're willing to spend. And I spent time chatting with several others here just to make sure we had good motherboard recommendations.
As for high-end, I personally start that at $2000 and go up. This is close to that, which is why it's "performance" midrange--or "upper" midrange if you prefer. At $2000, I'd seriously push for adding an IPS LCD, and if you give me $3000 to work with, there's no beating 30" LCDs (still) with most likely a 5970 GPU to drive it. Or you can grab three 24" LCDs and run them in portrait mode. I'd also call that sort of setup "Dream" but regardless of the label it's still just a really expensive and fast PC.
Jarred, I agree, the biggest thing to think about is obviously the motherboard. Could you give a little more insight into your decision that 890FX isn't worth it? I'll be buying a board quite soon, and up until today, based on info here and at TechReport, I'd been leaning heavily towards an FX-based board, with the same CPU you selected. Since I don't need the latest and greatest graphics support, however, the GX's integrated one would be fine. ("Performance" for me is a solid number cruncher that also does some HTPC and storage duty. The only game I play for now is WoW.) I'm trying to build this thing to last more than 3 years without heavy upgrading, though :)
I talked with Raja about the motherboard and chipset, and he said that the primary benefit of 890FX over 890GX is better extreme overclocking. 890FX also has dual x16 links for CrossFire while 890GX will drop to x8/x8 for dual GPUs. So if you don't plan on running dual GPUs and you don't intend to pursue extreme overclocking, 890GX is a great chipset.
Good article. One taking the time to read it calmy and understand the caveats will find how to modify the hardware list.
However, I think that you have overlooked the fact that the 890FX chipset can do virtualization, something the other 8xx chipsets are incapable of.
Given that running WinXP mode in Win7 Pro/Ultimate requires virtualization capabilities, this is an important point for some users.
The article does not mention virtualization capabilities for the intel builds either.
Question:
Does a PC used only for photo editing (Photoshop) and video capture/editing/encoding (Première) from an HD camcorder (AVCHD codec) benefits at all from a powerful graphics card ? or can do with an embedded solution ?
I know Photoshop benefits from GPUs now (via OpenGL), but I don't know how much of a difference there is between IGP and dGPU. I don't know if Premier benefits from GPU or not, though I know there are other video manipulation applications that leverage CUDA (in which case the AMD GPU we selected wouldn't help, obviously).
As far as virtualization, I thought that was the CPU that handled that. I wasn't aware of any limitations with 890GX not supporting virtualization. It appears that the IOMMU isn't virtualized except in 890FX, which isn't a problem with Xen, Hyper-V or VMware ESX but prevents its use with WinXP Mode on Win7.
Honestly, I hear about Virtual WinXP in Win7 so often that it's really quite surprising, as I don't know of a single person who uses it. I'm sure businesses do, but do home users really care? I have been using Vista on my machines since 2007, and outside of a few 64-bit compatibility issues (which have since been solved with updated applications), I haven't had any apps that didn't run properly. Who is actually using this (which means you need to buy Win7 Business or Ultimate... a small minority of home users), and what are they using it for? It just seems like something 99.99% of people won't ever use.
Let me rephrase that, the midrange is the typical pc a consumer buys with a specific goal in mind. What the average person with (game-)performance in mind buys, thats what I call midrange.
But anyway, why would de motherboard be the most important part? There is barely any difference between specific motherboard, except for some very specific features that most of the people don't need. When looking at motherboards, performance is a non-issue, there is barely any difference. The only difference is features, but what are features that are so important that you need to have them, but not important enough so that not all motherboards have them? (And no, I'm not stating that any motherboard is ok, I just wouldn't know.)
And damn it's annyong that there is no "edit" button. Anyway, if everything is a drop-in replacement, than what is the point in making a guide at all?
(Though again, let it be clear, I really like the effort that is put in these articles, but there is a fundamental flaw with these guides, almost any guide. And that is that every person has different needs and the persons who can adapt these configs to their needs are often the persons who actually don't need a guide, while the ones who can use a guide very often don't know anything about it and what to and what not to replace.)
Once you select and install a motherboard, upgrading it down the road is really a PITA. Motherboard choice determines many of your core features, and while performance rarely varies much between brands, quality and stability (as well as overclocking and memory support) really differentiate the boards. If you only want to run stock, an inexpensive ECS board will probably work fine. Then again, I've seen a lot of inexpensive boards die after a couple years of use, while higher quality boards can last 5+ years.
If you want to upgrade the HDD, GPU, RAM, or DVD you can do so in a matter of minutes. (If you have to clone the HDD to another drive, it will take a lot longer, but mostly you're waiting to copy files from one drive to the other.) If you need to upgrade the motherboard, it's pretty much like building a system from scratch.
Ok, well yes, that's a fact, I forget that there are the really cheap brands. What I'm more interested in, usually when assembling a pc I go for the cheapest ATX motherboard from a decent brand (Gigabyte, Asus, ...) with a decent chipset. I've always thought that there is barely any difference between the motherboards within the same brand (Gigabyte f.e.) when looking at performance AND quality, and only in features. (Most people don't need the features of the 790GX f.e.)
So example: Before the 880-chipset from AMD I would've went for the cheapest (f.e.) Gigabyte 785G motherboard when assembling an AMD system. (Only checking for crossfire possibilities if wanted and ofcourse if nothing was odd with it.)
Any comments on that way of selecting a motherboard? (I'm just hoping to learn from it. :) )
Thanks a lot for the information already. I hope I did not offend with my comments, their just my opinions. ;)
Really, it depends on two things: how demanding you are... and luck. LOL. Sometimes you can get a cheap board that's absolutely rock solid, and other times you get a piece of crap that never seems to work quite right. Some boards have compatibility issues with some brands of RAM, USB peripherals, etc. The major brands (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI...) tend to be safe, but even then there's the occasional lemon. Best way to avoid getting burned IMO is to not buy a board until it has been out at least 2-3 months, and then read a few reviews and see what users are saying. Few boards are perfect, so for instance anything at Newegg with a 4 or 5 rating is typically fine.
+1, 500-550W is more than enough here. This is a third source freeing up money for an SSD, or even 2R0 SSD, wich will actually make a huge difference in user experience.
Because PSU wattage ratings are a totally fail way to judge them
the higher the capacity: the less utilised it is during operation, the cooler it stays during operation, the more efficient it is, the longer it will last, the more room to upgrade in the future you will have, the better class of components are used in its manufacture. In general.
Of course there's a huge problem with yumcha "750W" PSUs which have stupidly high 3.3V/5V rails but are sadly lacking where it's actually needed - the 12V rail. But they are not the price that's listed in this article.
But marketing-by-misleading-specifications seems to be well represented in all hardware component markets (GTX260M anyone...)
On the other hand, most pc's are idle or on low load for most of the time. Account for the fact that under 20% load the efficiency of a PSU drop dramaticly, your better of with a PSU of less watt. At 100% load a PSU is still very efficient. Look at the 80Plus bronze rating: 82% @ 20%, 85% @ 50% and 82% at 100%. Less utilized percentage wise, isn't per definition a good thing.
Also it will last just as long. I mean, nobody said you have to find a PSU that exactly matches your maximum load. If the 310Watt load is correct, then 750Watt is almost 2.5 times what is needed. Even with 500 Watts you have quite a huge reserve.
And you also totally contradict yourself. You state: "Because PSU wattage ratings are a totally fail way to judge them" and then you state why higher is supposably better. If you want the better quality, buy a 500Watt PSU at the same price of the average 700Watt PSU, than you'll have a quality one.
The 50% argument is just silly. I can imagine that all PSU builders, because they know alot of us speak that way,, are doing their best to keep their PSU's performing just like that. With a meager 2% better efficiency at te "sweet spot". Really, what a fuss about a meager 2% difference between 50 and 80% . Atleast, that's what you see with the better brands. Look at the number, Silentpcreviews. They say it all!
Most good Quality PSU stay perfectly fine up and around 80% of their rated power. So a HX750 for example, can deliver 600watts (output) , at the wall that "would be around 700watt" (input). It gets a litte hotter and the fan is spinning a little harder then. So what ? That's exactly what a PSU is supposed to do! That's exaclty what i expect from a "high quality" PSU, for which you payed a premium price.
I remember the day, i was running a fat setup, with a meager "soso quality" Aopen 350watt. Others would not believe me, it worked day and night, rock solid en never broke down on me. No, you know what it is ? FEAR! Fear for the unknown. It's easy to make people scared when they know shit about PSU's. Brands are guilty too, mostly the cheaper brands. With their overrated PSU's and poor quality.
When i buy a Seasonix X-750 you can bet i will make it swett. Not too much, but enough to give the feeling i didn't put a V8 engine on my bycicle.
where did I say to go with a crappy PSU. You could get a good quality PSU for less money then this with less wattage, that will for the overall system be far more efficent, and more importantly sufficent.
Mid-Range PC's imho, are all about Bang for the buck. The 750W PSU used in this example fails that test.
So using your own estimation, the optimal load for a PSU is rougly 75%, lower means cooler and more silent but less efficient.
The build in question has full load peak power draw roughly 350W from the wall socket. Idle likely under 100W.
750W: optimal efficiency at 750*0,75 = 562W, overshooting by 562/350=1,6x=60% idle load: <100/750 = 13%, wastefull?
500W: optimal efficiency at 500*0,75 = 375W, overshooting by 375/350=1,06=6%, close to optimal. idle load: <100/500 = 20%, less wastefull yet still cool at idle fan speed?
And despite all this discussion, we already mentioned the potential to downgrade the PSU on page 4:
" Those looking to run a lower spec PSU with a single GPU will be fine with the little brother of our recommended PSU, the CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W. Priced at $50 (with a $10 MIR), it should be more efficient when your system is idle while still providing enough juice for the 5850. If you are thinking about going the Clarkdale route and/or a less powerful GPU, then we'd definitely recommend the 400W PSU as a more sensible choice. Just don't try running SLI/CrossFire setups."
Yes, and the 400watt is only just enough and leave hardly any room for future singlecard upgrades, or a few harddisks for a raid mode. Around 500watt would be optimal for this config and a single videocard.
Normally power supply efficiency is rated at close to full load. This means running a power supply outside that range is actually less efficient. At a lower load although it will draw less power and generate less heat in an absolute sense, it will draw more power and generate more heat PER watt.
Now take a 750W and a 500W (similar design) both running at say 400W, generally the 500W will be more efficient, thus draw less and run cooler.
More is better is not necessarily true and too many people seem to forget that.
Your math is correct but the basis for your conclusions is not. A power supply should be rated to cover the Peak power of the system with a continuous rating close to that of the system.
The power supply chosen for this article happens to have a 80plus rating at 20%, 50% and 80% load (mfg. spec.) which definitely make it suitable for the built. As some other people pointed out, a less expensive unit/lower power would work as well.
Some of what you say is actually incorrect. At pretty much any load, a 750W PSU will be quieter than a 500W PSU, because it's not reaching the limits of its design. Also, at 400W load, the 750W will be in the range of maximum efficiency (using 53% of its rated output) while the 500W will be heating up more and running at lower efficiency (80% of maximum output). The 80Plus specs maximum efficiency at 50% load, and while the 500W will be more efficient at 100W loads, once you get to 350W the 750W will be more efficient (unless you're comparing a crappy 750W to a good 500W of course).
Also note that at idle power draw of around 100W (give or take), the 500W at 80% efficiency would be using 125W; if the 750W is 70% efficient, it's using 142W. Bump power draw up to 400W and if the 500W is now 82% compared to 85% you're looking at 488W vs. 470W. Basically, you're trading lower power draw at idle for higher power draw at load. But you'll also have a noisier system at load with the 500W, as all PSUs pretty much start ramping fan speed quickly beyond 50% load.
So given the choice, I'd stick a 750W into an upper midrange system, simply because it runs quieter and leaves room to grow (i.e. a second GPU could be added). But, if you know you're never going to add a second GPU or heavily overclock I'd stick with a 500W (as recommended in the text).
No, good psu ramping up around 60/70%. Besides, that's what a fan is for, spinning. Noise become nasty, around or above 80%. Below that, most good psu's stay very silent. Futhermore, often you will not even notice it while alot of people are a playing a game at that point and you can imagine what makes the most noise....
Like my subject title says I'm so upset now i find it physically challenging to sit still and type. WHY ON EARTH do you not include an SSD in a $1500+ build in 2010??? But you include BluRay???
Sollution #1: Remove Bluray, add random dvd burner (if needed) and an Intel x25-V for OS + core apps. This will roughly double the PCmark vantage score of the machine, and make a serious increase in value.
Sollution #2: Remove Bluray, downgrade from 5850OC to 5830 (or 5770 for "good enough" instead of best graphics), add random dvd burner (if needed) and an Intel x25-M G2 80GB for OS + apps. This give much greater value, as the 5830 can run all the same games at a slightly lower framerate for $100 less, possibly with a step down in resolution or particle/HDR/texture/AA/AF.
I will speculate the only reason this article got posted and not corrected in the editorial is because Anand is out of the country. I am seriously disappointed such an article was posted on Anandtech.
I love my SSD, but I wouldn't give up graphics performance for it. It boils down to what you're building the machine to do.
There just isn't a one-size-fits-all, especially at this price point. If we were talking sub-$500 machines, then basically you're already assuming mostly browsing, media, productivity and some very light gaming. However, $1700 means a serious investment.
Boiling things down even further, let's say we're talking about a gaming machine. Even then, it's hard to define the meaning of value for graphics cards. Basically, what I want is a card that will power though a certain library of my favourite games, plus what might come out over the next year or two - at the graphics settings I want, and at playable frame-rates or better. If saving 50% on the graphics card means a 20% drop in performance, that might be looked at as a good value savings. On the other hand, if that 20% drop in performance means I'm turning down graphics settings or dealing with poor frame rates, my gaming experience is annoyingly diminished. And, in the end, I've only saved about 8% of the total system cost and given up 20% performance.
I absolutely agree, though, that the blu-ray player doesn't make sense for the kind of computing/gaming these systems seem to be designed to do.
I do not understand why some get so bent out of shape at you offering some suggestions to people on how to build a balanced system at a certain price range. What does it matter what label you call it, if you clearly explained the price point you are shooting for (which you did)?
Also, you explained various options to up- or down-grade various components to improve performance or save money depending on some of the various circumstances that people may find themselves in when they are building for themselves. So why do some get so upset when it is not the perfect system for them?
And finally, if you know exactly what you want, why are you reading this article? This article is for those, like me, who do not know exactly what they want, and appreciate the guidance from those who have some experience with a lot of the various options out there.
My only complaint is that I would like to see these guides more often, but I can understand the hesitation of the staff at AT to do these since they get blasted every time they do one. Anyway, thanks to Mike and Jarred for doing this.
I'm nog saying that it is a bad guide. I'm just stating that it is very odd not to choose for an ssd. Especially because you can do so without increasing the price (by a lot). Look at the changes I suggested for example.
It's not about getting upset because it's not the best system for me. It's just that I expect a buyer's guide to be as optimal as possible, and perhaps offer some alternative routes for special occasions. Now they take a special occasion (blu-ray), and advice a little bit on a better way.
The only reason I, and probably the others as well, are stating these things are that we want to improve this guide. Everybody's cricitcs try to make improvements without increasing the cost OR try to lower the cost of the system, how can you complain about such a thing?
I help out quite a lot of people that are building a system. That's why I care btw. I want them to buy a pc that's best for their needs.
I think the main problem is that the system proposed is a midrange GAMING system, not a midrange WORKSTATION. Large difference there,
GAMING systems do not benefit that much from a SSD (I have one, and I know that load times are not affected much, aside from exceptions such as MMORPGs). Games such as Crysis have almost a 0% boost in loading time on a SSD on most systems. Thus a gamer would probably opt for a more powerful graphics card instead of the cost of a SSD (or for that matter, the Bluray drive ... *sigh*).
There is no freaking way that a WORKSTATION needs a 5850, even if you do some fairly intense gaming on your off time. A 5770 or something is still an incredibly strong card and saves you 100. Or get a last gen card (4870/4890) and get even FASTER performance for cheaper. (You also wouldn't need the Bluray drive, and could save some $$$ on the power supply, and on your yearly electric bill). Case in point: I still have a 8800 GTS 512MB, and it's still decent on almost everything in 16x10, though for a new build I'd like something faster. That money would of course go into a SSD which results in a ridiculous boost in productivity.
As mentioned, there are so many options that unless we put together half a dozen potential builds and explain each component in detail (which I've done in the past) you're going to gloss over things. From the intro:
" Our recommendations today skew pretty heavily toward graphics performance, with the single most expensive part—the factory OCed Gigabyte Radeon HD 5850—comprising approximately 25% of the base system cost (or about 18% of the complete system). Though it may be a little over the top for some, one look at graphics card comparison charts will tell you that things drop off rather precipitously after the 5850, with the drops in performance not corresponding all that sensibly to the drops in price. While there are plenty of less expensive cards that will still deliver acceptable performance—for many, at any rate—none seem to offer as desirable a mix of price, performance and future proofing (DX11) as the 5870’s little brother. For our midrange builds today, it feels just about right. If you're not worried about gaming or graphics, feel free to downgrade to something else, but we'd recommend sticking with at least an HD 5670 to get all the latest and greatest video decoding and power management features, or grab an HD 5450 if you're willing to skip out on a few extras like vector adaptive deinterlacing. Or if you don't care about DX11 right now and think CUDA is more important, you might prefer the GT 240."
I could have added another paragraph just as long in the intro discussing the pros/cons of SSDs. Pro: fast. Con: small capacity and an order of magnitude more expensive per GB. Blu-ray was something Mike put in, and I have no reason to remove it, though obviously that's an easy thing to do. Of course, it's also easy to add an SSD down the road, clone your main HDD over to it (well, that might take a bit more effort), and go on your merry way. Ultimately, it's different strokes for different folks. I'll take the higher GPU over an SSD any day of the week on a desktop, because I still enjoy games.
IMHO, it could be summarized as easy as: *Hardcore gamer / upper mid-end gaming rigg: 5850OC. *Casual/hobby gamer using the computer for other stuff a couple of hours a day: 5830 + x25-V (OS + core apps) in addition to the HDD (maybe downgrade HDD to Green to make back some cache when/if the IOPS requirements are off-loaded to the SSD. *Productivity, using the computer mainly for workstation (and/or office) type things, with a couple of hours casual gaming now and then: 5770 + X25-M 80GB. None of the above warrants a BD reader.
Possible reason for BD reader: high-end HTPC, or fileserver/workstation ripping BD videos. If neither of theese 2 are met, BD is a complete waste of money and you should go for DVD burner instead ($25).
Right, no criticism intended at the article, but the above is a more reasonable approach towards designing system configurations that actually suits different groups of people. Like it or not, not all users are the same. Neither should the system design for the users be the same.
It wouldn't even lengthen the article much to include a few alternatives. For instance, the core components (i7-750, motherboard, RAM (though some may object to 4GB, but whatever), case, fan, etc) are all solid, but obviously the rest of the system is amenable to tweaking. You obviously shown that you could give alternatives - i.e. discussion of motherboard choices, video card choice, etc. It wouldn't be that hard to put in a few more itemized tables as potential variants of the midrange system.
That's a rather black and white approach to the whole thing. Just because I work a lot on my PC I can't also want a good high end gaming PC? Does that mean that everyone who works isn't allowed to play anymore? ;)
Most people will want to do more than just one thing on their PC: playing BRs (well I don't need that, but I'm sure there are people out there who do), playing and working. So one balanced build really isn't that bad, as long as you mention (or it's obvious) what you can leave away if you don't do XY.
The only thing is that a SSD is a great investment for most things you want to do with your PC (well at least if you consider spending more than 1k$ on one), so the extra added paragraph really is a good idea. We can still argue if you need one or not, but it surely warrants that discussion, so it can be a bit more prominently mentioned.
(Note: Responding to the thread and not necessarily to the post right above mine. Heh)
Ultimately, an SSD is about adding performance but it doesn't improve the features or capabilities of a system in any way. A Blu-ray reader does exactly one thing that a non-BR drive can't do. Surprisingly, that one thing is reading Blu-ray discs. If you want to watch Blu-ray movies (or rip them for storage on your 1TB HDD and later viewing over the network on your living room HTPC), that can be a very useful one thing.
An SSD will only improve certain usage patterns, and personally most of those usage patterns don't apply to me, particularly on my desktop. My system is generally on during the day, with email, office, internet, Photoshop, and Explorer windows open. They are usually open all the time, so I don't need to wait for the apps to load. With 4GB RAM, I also don't tend to run out of memory and have to go to the swap file. I turn on my system once in the morning and shut it down once at night. I can hit the power button, walk away, and come back 5 minutes later and never know that the HDD was thrashing during that time. Which is exactly what I do. (Technically I sleep the computer at night and wake it up in the morning, so it's more like 30-45 seconds of HDD thrashing.)
With everything I need available, the only time I really feel the HDD slowness is if I play games. Load a game, and an SSD might load it a fraction faster, but as someone else mentioned, getting into a round of L4D2 faster usually just means waiting an extra 5-10 seconds for the guy(s) with slow PCs to load the level. And shaving 5 seconds off a level load time when I'm then going to play that level for 10-20 minutes represents a very small amount of lost "productivity". Of course, we're talking about using a 32GB SSD as an OS+Apps drive, so I couldn't really fit more than a couple games on it anyway and more likely all my games would still come off the HDD.
Are there instances where SSDs truly make their presence known? Of course. Heavy multitasking, launching seven apps at once, start up and resume times, and situations where you access tons of small files randomly. I'm not sure how often I actually do any of those, hence my feeling that for 45X the cost per GB (roughly... a 1.5TB drive costs about as much as a 32GB SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... those situations where the SSD is 50X as fast don't come into play all that often. In short, measuring a dramatic improvement in benchmarks that stress the storage subsystem isn't the same as delivering a huge real-world improvement in performance and usability.
Well said! Those are my sentiments exactly. I have enough knowledge to get myself in trouble and rely on the recommendations of AnandTech to avoid making big mistakes. I look forward to all of their guides and recommendations.
Maybe back 10~12 years ago, $1700 could be considered a mid-range computer... but not today.
What I consider:
$400~500 = Office / basic computers (does Word, internet just fine) - AMD typical X2 CPU. $600~700 = Basic Gaming system with a 5600 or 5700 series video card and a sub $100 AMD CPU. $700~999 = Mid-Range gaming PC... this CAN be a system with a 5850 card, easily.
$1000~$1800 = top end, dual video card systems for uber gamers.
Also $700~1200 for higher end desktop systems with hybrid drive arrangements (SSD boot & application drive + HDD for games & data).
In the real world, as shown on this site and others. The difference in gaming performance between a $65 AMD X2 CPU and a $950 i7-Quad is about 25% when both are using a top end video card. Go with a $150~180 AMD X4 CPU - and that difference in performance is closer to 5~10% slower.
Rather pocket the money, put it towards an SSD or bigger monitor, go out on a date, etc.
This was a PERFORMANCE Midrange buyer's guide, not a midrange "value" or "budget" system. As such, there is still lots of opportunity to spend more money, even without it turning into a "dream" system.
Notice it has an i5, not an i7 Intel CPU.
Notice it has a $310 graphics card, not a $500 graphics card.
Notice it has 4GB of memory, not 8.
Notice it has a Bluray player, not a burner.
There has been some good debate, especially about Bluray and SSD trade offs. But take a chill pill. There's no need to be hostile. No need to be defensive. I'll bet no two people at AnandTech even agree on one of these articles.
This falls pretty squarely in the Midrange Gaming PC category. Probably not a midrange PC in general, but it matches up pretty well pricewise with other guides across the internet. For example at Tom's Hardware, they have 3 Gaming builds: Budget at $750, Midrange at $1500, and Extreme at $3000. So $1700 isn't out of line for a midrange build. I don't think this system gives you the best bang for your buck necessarily, but that's another topic completely.
That being said, I agree with the blu-ray/SSD comments above. At this time, I don't see how a blu-ray drive is necessary in anything other than HTPC builds.
Blu-ray makes it possible for your computer to do something that it otherwise couldn't - namely watch blu-ray movies. SSD does no such thing, although I have no doubt that it's a nice thing to have. I'm not saying the suggested configuration is optimal (and I'm not saying it isn't), but choosing blu-ray over SSD is hardly a reason for apoplexy.
Considering it's a "Performance midrange" and not a "high-end HTPC", an SSD for os + (core) apps makes a lot more sense. The system will always feel snappy, and all programs will load nearly instantly even if you multitask like crazy and copy files while doing a virus scan. Even during light disk impacting multitasking (virus scan, updates, or file copy in the background while attempting to interact with the system), a WD black will slow to a crawl. I would, whitout any doubt, list BD as an optional upgrade if you intent to watch BD movies on the PC. If not, it's a notable waste of money, and is a piece of hardware that will serve no purpose most of the time.
32GB is enough for Windows 7 (64bit, any edition), office suite, other "office" type apps, antivirus, HTPC type apps, and small usefull programs (i have done this on 3 computers, so i'd know). For a couple of larger apps (like CS4 suite), 40GB should be enough. For a higher number of larger apps and app suites, an 80GB SSD could be considered if placing the least used large apps on a short-stroke partition on a "green" HDD doesn't yield acceptable performance for those apps. I use 64GB for OS + apps + games myself, and my best friend also does so. A third friend uses 80GB, and i helped a girl i know set up a 40GB for W7 + apps. None of them have complained about space, but loved the speed and said "It was totally worth it" and "i'm never going back to HDD for OS".
I could never, with a straight face, recommend getting a bluray reader. Just for the sole reason that pretty much all bluray playback software is garbage, and you'd be better off getting a bluray burner (perhaps when they are more affordable) or a dedicated bluray player. Unless you absolutely need a bluray reader, I think we could all do without it. Bluray burner makes more sense, 25GB+ data discs can be incredibly useful. Same with bluray authoring. But playback, until we see open source playback software I can't recommend paying for bluray playback software.
Firstly, the article format and layout are excellent and vast improvements over past articles. You've done a lot of work there and it shows.
Secondly, the build in the article isn't bad at all, but here's how I'd do it: 1) Drop the BluRay. Unless you're watching BluRay's on your PC (why?) or ripping them to a media server, it's a pointless expense and people who know they need one can figure it out on their own. Savings: ~$90.
2) Stick with the OEM CPU cooler. From the other components this isn't going to be a silent build, and the people who are going to overclock should know enough to figure out what they want. Savings: ~$30.
3) Go with higher quality 2.1 speakers. 5.1 is great for headphones, but setting up 5 speakers around the typical PC station is a PITA that typically yields substandard results when compared to a quality 2.1 setup unless you're an audio geek. Savings: ~$0.
4) Get a cheaper ~400-500W PSU. 750W is incredible overkill for this build. Savings: ~$40.
5) $310 is too much for a video card for all but an incredibly small subset of the population. With 95% of AAA titles being console ports that can easily be played maxed out on a <$200 video card, the days of beastly PC cards like the 5850 being all that relevant are over for the time being. Savings: ~$110.
I just saved you $300 without even trying hard. Buy some games, upgrade your monitor and case so they'll last for your next build, or just pocket the difference.
I actually have that mainboard in my system, and while it's a great board it's NOT a good choice for Crossfire. The secondary PCI-E slot is a 4X slot off of the south bridge (as opposed to the higher performance on-die PCI-E controller of the i750), and it runs with a 2.5 GHz base clock, not 5 GHz which is half the speed of a standard PCI-E 3.0, so in terms of bandwidth you should think of it as a 2X slot. It will work, but it's ugly, and I suspect a 2x slot is going to drop a huge performance penalty, even for a pair of 5850s.
There are P55 boards out there which can split the on-die PCI-E controller into two proper 8x lanes in crossfire mode, which is actually plenty of bandwidth to drive even a pair of 5970s without issues.
"The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 is a feature-rich option... If you want to enable both USB3 and SATA6, the primary GPU slot will drop down to x8 speed, while the secondary x16 slot always runs at x4 bandwidth. For the price, however, it's a very good board and it has good overclocking abilities if you're interested.... If you prefer higher performance CrossFire/SLI, and you want Firewire, look at the MSI P55-GD65."
I'll clarify the paragraph by pointing out explicitly that the MSI board does x8/x8 for CF/SLI instead of x16/x4.
No NOT like it says in the text. The text is wrong. The text says the secondary works at 4x bandwidth. But it doesn't. It IS in fact a 4x slot but it's a HALF SPEED 4x slot, so it's REALLY 2X bandwidth.
4X bandwidth would probably be enough for crossfire, 2x bandwidth is really unacceptable. Which is why I'm objecting to this board as a good choice for someone considering crossfire in the future. It's in fact a really bad choice if you're considering crossfire.
But it's still a great board if you have no interest in crossfire.
Great guide. But one clarification. The article states "The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 is a feature-rich option for the builder who might want CrossFireX or SLI down the road" - but this board isn't licensed for SLI. As far as I'm aware, NVidia won't allow it on any of the x16, x4 boards.
This is at the upper range of mid, with many options listed in the article to reduce price.
If you DON'T OC, and only are using 1 card (no sli) then you can drop the PS, get rid of the cooler and save possibly $50 right off the bat.
Other cards were mentioned as well, dropping it even further, depending on your need for Gaming Speed.
As others have mentioned, a Blu-Ray may not be needed, dropping that $105 down to a $25 LG. We are already getting down to $1000 for a full box here.
Now, taking those parts and using your own KB, HD, DVD, Vid Card and other parts from your current machine (if you feel like it) can easily drop this down to $700 or less. You can then upgrade, piece by piece, until you get what you want at the price you want.
As for SSD? I have been watching those. the performance is great, granted, but that only comes with loading or transcoding, not with many apps for buisness, or in-game situations (Wow, you loaded up the board the quickest! You can now wait 47 seconds for everyone else to join!!!!).
You can always upgrade later. Storage is one of the most fickle price points on the market, excluding Vid Cards. A wait of 6 months may bring you 2X the capacity for the same price.
it is also kind of odd with people screaming about "THIS IS NOT MIDRANGE" and others screaming for an SSD.... I think the fact that there are both means you (the original writer) probably hit a good sweet spot in between!
Maybe instead of classifying them as "midrange", a different nomenclature should be used. Just state the price ranges and what they are built for rather than deciding what people should see them as. This is in the range of a $1000-$1500 box. It is geared for performance, so maybe "$1000-$1500 performance Machine" and shut all the complainers up.....
Last point, when machines can be built for $500 all included, or $3000 for close to TOTL, screamiming that $1700 is not midrange is just plain silly.
I'm just going to chime in and suggest losing the Blu-Ray. You don't really justify the necessity for it, and your other choice of components, in particular the overclocked graphics card and bargain 5.1 speakers, make clear the case for this being a gaming machine. So, I would suggest losing the Blu-Ray for the next go-around, which I'm eager to see. Thanks for the article guys.
I'd almost call anything with a 5850 high end nowadays for gaming anyways. Personally I am going to wait until I can put all of my programs, OS, games, etc I use on an affordable SSD to me before I get one($300 for 300gb sounds about right). I think having some stuff on an SSD and some not would bug me a lot more than just sticking to HDs like I do now. I also agree Blu-ray to me still seems very niche but it makes sense for the future to get it now even if it's a bit expensive.
I cant figure out what the target audience is for these systems. (OK maybe MAC buyers, since these two systems fall into their price range and maybe the nobrainer-rich kid with lots of dosh to spare)
PC gamers would opt for better CPUs and SLI/CF perhaps, audio enthusiasts would sneer at the speakers (they are utter crap, usable for video streams with 5.1 channel sound yes, but they just massacre the audio files in stereo (so do 2.1)), media coders would be satisfied with the 6core and so would creative artists, although I think they would pick double the CPU power these 2 configurations have to offer and be satisfied with the GPU at hand (since Adobe loves GPUs now) but all of the above mentioned groups would hang you for only including 4GB of RAM. All of these groups of users would benefit from having a SSD.
So all of these guys are mid/high end users. And none of those would pick the configuration you bungled up. Verdict - FAIL
Since me being from the EU, I cant possibly imagine how much these two systems would cost here. OK I can. Price x 1.3, lets call it 2K Euros - btw. that would be the equivalent of an OVERKILL systems price in EU. (lets skip the wealthy minority and focus on real people - that is what mainstream means I guess).
I'm sorry, but most players play games that are 3 - 5 years old and enjoy playing them. They play the occassional new game out there. Sorry,. but the top games are played by such a marginally low population. I'm part of a gaming club that is linked to other gaming clubs in the state and recently the majority of gamers out there were not playing Crysis or Batman.
I still have an older system and with my configuration at 1900 x 1200 (and higher resolutions) play top games. Only lackluster thing in here is my aging video card, but for the most part I can get a stable to good framerate.
The majority of people that I know swiched from PC to XBOX360 in order to play games. They don't want to be troubled with frequent upgrading and only care about just playing game. I personaly do not own next generation consoles, but I know many who have made the switch back to consoles lately....
Majority of computer users are not gamers, they do basic things and I can build a system for basics that is $200 - $300, While a lot of parents do not want their kids messing around their hard earned PCs, so they buy them consoles. Until the industry can make enough software and not just enough to count on my fingers....the majority wont care about the highest end software out there...or even the latest action games when anyone can buy a console and be littered with them.
What is up with the horrible picture for this post? For a moment I thought it was a joke from your very first System Buyer's Guide or something, the worst looking case I've ever seen and a 7 year old 4:3 LCD monitor!
Just about anything call fall into the "Midrange" category unless it is the fastest and most expensive parts out there. The system looks more expensive because they are buying a new monitor, keyboard, mouse, surround sound setup and a new OS to go with it. Most PC builders will already have/keep most of this stuff the same when they upgrade their system.
First, I agree it is a midrange from performance perspective, as high end should at least have a "reasonable" i7 and "sane" CF/SLI setup. But please (again) consider that AnandTech is an international website, a midrange system should be (relatively) affordable by most people. Most people in my country even think my $1000 system is "crazy". I know we're might be the minority, but please consider this. Maybe using price range instead of Low/Mid/High moniker...
Since most of the people that read AT is tech enthusiast and usually buld their own system. I'd like more "roundups" with (if possible) every component available for each category. For example, roundups of every motherboard with 890GX chipset, not just a "select" model.
Oh and, why you never metion about "other" SSD that exist beside Intel/Indilinx/Crucial/SandForce? What about those Imation/A-Data/Sandisk/etc SSD? Is they're any good?
Oh and, why you never metion about "other" SSD that exist beside Intel/Indilinx/Crucial/SandForce? What about those Imation/A-Data/Sandisk/etc SSD? Is they're any good?
I'm guessing you mean SSD controllers. Imitation uses Mtron controllers, they are older generation and use SLC only. I have 2 of these Mtron Pro SSDs in RAID from back in 2008 before Intel were avalible. They work well, but they behave a bit different from the new SSDs. For one, Mtron SSD don't support NCQ, they have really low read latency, but fairly low random write (roughly 200-250 IOPS, about the same as a 15K SAS HDD whitout NCQ or shortstroke). In everyday use, they are comparable to Indilinx drives, but are more expensive. The pluss is they have no performance degradation whatsoever. Mine perform just as new after soon 2 years in RAID-0 as a much used system drive.
SanDisk SSDs i don't know a lot about, i haven't seen any info outside marketing campaings. The "vRPM" scheme is a farce. Their netbook replacement drives are likely a bit better than the ones they come with, but nothing like Intel or SandForce.
You also have Adtron SSDs, but i don't know if those are on the market anymore.
JMicron is a controller producer you didn't mention. Their early controllers had major issues with random writes. The new generation, JMF612/618(aka thosiba) have gotten it under controll, but are still limited by not using NCQ. They can be considered low-end. WD has made custom firmware for a line using JMF612 focusing on realiability.
Memoright are also a controller producer, but as far as i know, they only made one model. It was the best consumer SSD out there before Intel, but cost the double of Mtron, wich weren't cheap either (I gave about $1500 for my 2x 32GB Mtrons...).
Samsung has made SSD controllers. They have been OK at sequential performance, but sub-par on random performance. The last controller thay made came out about the same time as Indilinx Barefoot, over a year ago. Indilinx clearly beat it at performance. I haven't heard anything about new controllers from them, but they have invested in (not bought) Fusion-IO, wich makes the most powerfull flash SSD controllers i know of.
The other SSD controllers i know of are exclusively used in the enterprise, like STec, BitMicro, Foremay, TMS, Fusion-IO, etc.
I'm sick of reading through all of these comments complaining about what $1700 means. Here's a recommendation to avoid this in the future: just drop the name.
System Buyer's Guide: $1700
Done. No more whiners with nothing better to do than complain that this is/isn't midrange, and instead focus on the actual part recommendations themselves. That's the point of the article!
I tend to agree with others who've posted that $1700 is NOT midrange. This is certainly upper mid range since performance increases from here are marginal at best and $1700 bucks is a good deal of money.
Next, what's with the benchmarks? I mean seriously. Your recommending a "system" why in the world would you bench the graphics at anything but native resolution of the LCD? The gaming benchmarks are utterly useless! Who is gonna lay out that kind of money for the 'system' and not game at 1900x1200? The only reason to not game there is if you can't... which we don't know because you didn't bench that!
1) Articles needs a title change: Something like "Mid-High End Gaming Machine" 2) The system isn't $1700...it's $1182. 3) 5850 is high end. Seriously, a $300 graphics card is high end. 4) PSU is overkill. 5) CPU is borderline high end.
This machine seems a tad expensive for a midrange gaming machine.
People who take your advice literally might think that a mid-end gaming machine is expensive @ nearly $1200. You can practically play any game and/or do anything with this machine....the only limitations are 4 GB of ram and non-SSD storage.
I used to have time (and enjoy) putting together my own system, but now with 3 kids it's not likely to happen. I also don't like the more generic alternatives at the big PC companies. Are there other companies who will build a system with components I select, maybe similar to what's here in the guide or with other things I choose?
Just wanted to update this build guide (since it's the last) with some words of caution. I built my dad a rig 4 months ago with many of the parts on this list (actually pretty much all of them). The Gigabyte UD3 mobo was a great piece that after some initial trouble (mobo and case didn't have a speaker so I couldn't hear the beeps) seemed to work great. I left everything at stock speeds since my dad uses this as a gaming rig exclusively and is only on a 24" LCD with the 5850. Since nothing he was playing was taxing the system I left everything stock.
So I get a call a couple weeks ago that he was getting a power cycling issue. He tried it the next day and it worked again. 2 weeks later though everything stopped working and it would just cycle on and off....I came over and removed the heatsink and CPU and there was a pin just lying in there disconnected from the mobo!!!
Contacted Gigabyte through newegg.com's reviews and have received no answer from them. To top it off there are a SLEW of 1 and 2 ratings in the last couple months of dead and faulty boards, most with the exact same issues my dad's system had. I'm fine with a defective part, but will not stand for poor/no customer service to make things right.
I've built my last 3 systems with Gigabyte mobo's and loved the frequent bios updates and quality of the boards. But I've had to switch (to an Asus also recommended in this review), and will not be going back unless I see the PR and customer service improve drastically from this company.
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pjconoso - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
$1700? Midrange? This is like PhP 85,000 in our currency and I'd like to think its high-end already.artifex - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
If you think "performance" means primarily number crunching, not gaming, then go with the AMD choice, but just use the integrated Radeon 4290 graphics on the ASUS motherboard and save yourself over $300 by dumping the GPU card. Not to mention that if you can get by with a 19" monitor, there are several to be had for like $150 or less (Fry's actually has a 23" for $200 before rebate, too), etc. Oh, if you dump the graphics card, you probably can get by with a smaller PS, too, and that will save more... And honestly, doesn't that retail Phenom II come with a stock cooler? Knock another $27 off...isrial - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
85.000 PhP !?That’s almost 290.000 Nigerian naira! The average nigerian would have to work two full years to be able to afford this system! Preposterous.
I demand this guide to be renamed into "System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Super Computer".
jleach1 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
And....as you can tell by the title...it says "PERFORMANCE MIDRANGE"JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I'm just putting this here so it hopefully doesn't get lost in the discussion below. You'll note that I added a paragraph on the "Base Components" page discussing the SSD/Blu-ray debate and making specific note of the option to downgrade one and upgrade the other. I sort of take that thing as a given, but obviously a lot of you want us to explicitly mention stuff like that.whatthehey - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Just FYI Jarred:http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
You struck a nerve by pissing on their "requirement" to have SSDs in any modern system. Now we know why GullLars has been such a prick over here. Of course if you're into competitive benchmarking, SSDs will help out. PCMark Vantage is a fucking joke the way it boosts your scores just by putting in an SSD. "Oh wow... my gaming score got 100% higher by using an SSD!" NOT!
Maybe everyone from AnandTech should go over there and piss in their forums for a while? Except, I know from being around here quite a while that the people here are of much higher caliber material than the idiot ORB-Penis worshipers at XtremeSystems.
So GullLars and pals, if you come back again, let me wish you a fine PISS OFF. Someone posts an informed guide that doesn't cater to your every whim by recommending a $200+ upgrade to a reasonable SSD and you tell people to come over here and complain. Real nice. And you can forget that 32GB SSD garbage... just my Windows and Program Files directories use up 20GB, and I don't have a ton of stuff installed! I doubt most mainstream users want to deal with telling every Tom, Dick, and Harry application to put files somewhere other than C:. I still spend 10 minutes on every tech support call trying to get people to open Windows Explorer and browse to a specific location. Those that know how to deal with multiple HDDs, changing user documents default location, etc. are more than capable of determining on their own whether or not they need an SSD without you pushing them as the be-all, end-all of computer performance.
Bipedal Humanoid - Thursday, July 1, 2010 - link
To those who complain: Before you post in a renowned place such as anandtech, make sure you know what you are talking about. You obviously have NO idea.This is a HARDWARE website not a MONEY website... Need more clarity? Ok then, Performance midrange means that in terms of the currently available hardware this guide hits the sweetspot between PERFORMANCE and cost.
If you still don't understand, I'd recommend you go buy yourself a Dell.
And to isrial: You can't make such demands, this is still a free country the last time I checked, your demands are reflecting poorly on your country mugu.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
1. I absolutely agree that this is NOT a midrange pc, but that it is high end. You can play (almost) any game at its maximum with that config, how can you call that midrange?2 . Please make up your mind internally, about ssd's:
"Though the time for suggesting the purchase of an SSD boot/OS disk in this segment appears to be drawing closer, prices just aren’t there yet." And that's it in this article, while over a year ago:
@ The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ
@ 3/18/2009
And even later explicitly:
Title: Why You Absolutely Need an SSD
The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD @ 8/30/2009
Over half a year ago you absolutely needed an SSD and now all of sudden the time isn't just there yet?
And on the other hand, you do put an Blu-ray player in it.
In general I really do like the articles on Anandtech, but personally I think this one is a swing and miss.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
The old "my midrange is not your midrange" argument rears its ugly head again. The classification is technically "Performance Midrange", which means it's closer to high-end than entry-level (as opposed to Entry Midrange, or Mainstream, or whatever you want to call it). You can, as someone above pointed out, make many changes--quite a few of which we mention in the text--to get the price lower.As for the SSDs, Anand loves them. He also loves Macs. And he happens to have far more available spending money than the vast majority of people... plus he gets them for free. Personally, I've used systems with and without SSDs and I don't feel the difference as much as Anand. For $100 I can get a 1TB hard drive. For the same $100 I can get a dumbed down 30GB or 40GB SSD. It will handle random file access a lot better, but you will fill up a big chunk of it with just your OS and Office.
Personally, I am fine having all of my documents, images, movies, etc. reside in C:\Users\Jarred. At present (and with much of my pre-2009 data moved to backup on a different drive), my user folder checks in at nearly 60GB of data. 12GB is just for the 2009/2010 AnandTech stuff, and another 12GB or so is for family pictures. I could store it in a different location, but I prefer not to as I like being able to open Explorer and get straight to my pictures with the link in the top-left.
Is Anand wrong? Nope. And neither am I. It's merely a case of different priorities. For the cost of a reasonable sized SSD (160GB is the smallest I'd be okay with), I can get a lot of other performance upgrades that will matter more to me.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Thanks for the quick reaction. But when you state that you don't feel the difference that much, then I can hardly imagine that you can actually feel the difference between the WD black and other 1TB HD's. Which makes it hard to justify going for the faster WD Black.And by shaving off those additional costs + switching out the Blu-ray for a normal dvd writer, I can fit in an Intel Postville 80GB for only a small extra.
Because you used newegg as reference, I'll use it as well:
HD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-30)
Dvd: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-85)
GPU: (HD5770 in crossfire, which is actually faster a lot of times) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-20) (and 30 rebate)
Memory: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... (-12) (and 15 rebate)
Which adds up to 147 + 45 rebate.
With the intel ssd costing 215: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
That's only $23 extra with extra GPU performance. The only thing your missing is the blu-ray.
Well, that's my point of view. I think most people don't need a blu-ray player in their computer, I even don't get the point of having one. If you want to watch a blu-ray movie, you'll do it on your tv.
GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Logical fail; strawman argument.
The motherboard on either setup has 6 SATA ports, not 1. You are not limited to using 1 storage device.
Also, most users that watch BluRay films has either a PS3/xbox360 or a BluRay player. Choosing a BD player over an SSD for this build makes me want to go /wallbash
I would also like to correct you on another point. Windows 7 64Bit proffesional edition with all updates and security essentials + MS office + Open office + Firefox + Burning program and most other _core apps_ will take up roughly 16GB once pagefile and hibernation is deactivated (or pagefile reduced to a few hundred MBs). Adding the full CS4 suite, a music editing program, 3DS max, and a couple of other apps will still leave you around the 30GB mark.
It's not much trouble at all to set up W7 to have OS + Apps on a SSD, and have a 1TB(+) HDD for all media, games, and others. Configuring "libraries" takes 1 minute and is easy to do. I've made libraries on a partition _NOT C:_ for: Pictures, Music, Videos, Documents, and Downloads on all computers i've set up. Running Ccleaner once a week keeps you from building up temp files on C, and restricting system restore to using 1-2GB will keep it from inflating over time.
whatthehey - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Nice try, but people aren't that stupid. Straw man argument:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Accusing Jarred of using straw man: EPIC fail! Accusing your opponent of using a straw man in order to pretend he didn't say anything useful on the other hand happens to be a form of the straw man argument, so congratulations!
Now, where did he misrepresent someone's position in order to knock it down and thereby make his position stronger? All I can see is that he said Anand loves SSDs. He gave examples of other things where he may not agree like Macs. He points out that SSDs cost a lot of money. Where is the attempt to refute something without actually refuting it?
Elsewhere, Jarred admits that the Blu-ray is unnecessary, and the article text now reflects this. So get off the damn high horse and quit bitching and moaning about what amounts to a difference of opinion. Sheesh!
GullLars - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
The strawman part was representing SSD as a replacement for a HDD and arguing that it's too low capacity and too expensive.The case you want to use an SSD in the majority of cases in is an addition to a HDD. Then capacity demands are way low, and the price pr GB can easily be justified because of the system acceleration effect.
AssBall - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
What part of his explanation of wanting to keep all of his files in the same place did you not understand? Go make your own damned buyer's guide if you are having so much trouble accepting or understanding this one.GullLars - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
I understand he wants that, but it's not an argument against an SSD as a system drive. You could simply move all documents to the harddisk, and have them in one place there.I'm not looking for a flamewar here, but i don't like it when people misrepresent the uses of SSDs.
The number one reason to use an SSD is system and application acceleration, not storage. The reasonable capacity range for that starts around 32GB, at wich point you will fit the entire OS and quite a bit more. Not being able to put everything you might want on it, and therefore ruling it out, denies you the benefits the stuff that would fit would get.
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
While he explains his preference, it's still his own personal preference. A good reviewer should look beyond that. SSD's are becoming more and more populair and i understand why. More populair then Blueray drives, but, aldo he admits it is not a dealmaker; the Blueray player is chosen in the configuration. WHY?The WD Black 1TB i can understand, WD Black series come with a 5 year warranty. That's a good argument to pay a little extra.
futrtrubl - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
You can pretty easily have it set up so the \users folder is located on another drive with it behaving exactly is it currently does. It`s how my computer is set up in fact.spigzone - Sunday, May 23, 2010 - link
" For $100 I can get a 1TB hard drive"make that a 1.5TB hard drive for $99.
or 2TB for $119.
jleach1 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
You guys are dumb. There is more than one way a system can be mid-range. This PC is midrange performance-wise...not money-wise. Don't be stupid. Use your brain. And if you make less than a thousand dollars a year....move.Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Excuse me?!This system has quite top-notch performance.
I'll quote myself: "You can play (almost) any game at its maximum with that config, how can you call that midrange?" A system of 900 is low-range to you then? That makes no sense at all.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Flip that around, what would you call a system with a 980X and multiple Fermi GPUs if this is high-end? I suppose you could call this the bottom of high-end, upper-midrange or lower high-end is really semantics.I wonder why they keep saying the i5-750 is faster than the i7-920 in most benchmarks when Bench shows the opposite.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
So a Porsche 911 Turbo S is midrange because there happens to be a Bugatti Veyron that costs more than 10 times as much?In my opinion, midrange is the "typical" range. What the average person would buy. Low end is below that, high end is above that. This is not something the average person would buy. But this argument is actually quite irrelevant, imho. You can't "prove" that something is mid-range, that depends on personal factors. I repeat, I was just stating that it was my opinion that this is rather high-end.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
By that definition, midrange is a $600 Dell. ;-)You can go so many routes with a $1000 to $1750 build, and whichever route you go and whatever you call it, it's still a $1000 to $1750 build. For the price and for a complete system, I'm very comfortable with the recommended components. If you don't want Blu-ray, I assume you're all plenty smart and can manage to not add the Blu-ray drive and--GASP!--even put a DVD-RW in its place. I figure the same goes for the GPU, storage, case, keyboard, mouse, and LCD. All of those are literally drop-in replacements, and we have plenty of other articles reviewing things like SSDs for the interested.
In my opinion, the biggest decision in any build really comes down to the choice of motherboard. That's the one where you have to really think about what you want and what you're willing to spend. And I spent time chatting with several others here just to make sure we had good motherboard recommendations.
As for high-end, I personally start that at $2000 and go up. This is close to that, which is why it's "performance" midrange--or "upper" midrange if you prefer. At $2000, I'd seriously push for adding an IPS LCD, and if you give me $3000 to work with, there's no beating 30" LCDs (still) with most likely a 5970 GPU to drive it. Or you can grab three 24" LCDs and run them in portrait mode. I'd also call that sort of setup "Dream" but regardless of the label it's still just a really expensive and fast PC.
artifex - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Jarred, I agree, the biggest thing to think about is obviously the motherboard. Could you give a little more insight into your decision that 890FX isn't worth it? I'll be buying a board quite soon, and up until today, based on info here and at TechReport, I'd been leaning heavily towards an FX-based board, with the same CPU you selected. Since I don't need the latest and greatest graphics support, however, the GX's integrated one would be fine. ("Performance" for me is a solid number cruncher that also does some HTPC and storage duty. The only game I play for now is WoW.) I'm trying to build this thing to last more than 3 years without heavy upgrading, though :)JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I talked with Raja about the motherboard and chipset, and he said that the primary benefit of 890FX over 890GX is better extreme overclocking. 890FX also has dual x16 links for CrossFire while 890GX will drop to x8/x8 for dual GPUs. So if you don't plan on running dual GPUs and you don't intend to pursue extreme overclocking, 890GX is a great chipset.artifex - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Thanks, Jarred. I think you just saved me a bunch of money.Benoit_P - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Good article. One taking the time to read it calmy and understand the caveats will find how to modify the hardware list.However, I think that you have overlooked the fact that the 890FX chipset can do virtualization, something the other 8xx chipsets are incapable of.
Given that running WinXP mode in Win7 Pro/Ultimate requires virtualization capabilities, this is an important point for some users.
The article does not mention virtualization capabilities for the intel builds either.
Question:
Does a PC used only for photo editing (Photoshop) and video capture/editing/encoding (Première) from an HD camcorder (AVCHD codec) benefits at all from a powerful graphics card ? or can do with an embedded solution ?
BP
JarredWalton - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
I know Photoshop benefits from GPUs now (via OpenGL), but I don't know how much of a difference there is between IGP and dGPU. I don't know if Premier benefits from GPU or not, though I know there are other video manipulation applications that leverage CUDA (in which case the AMD GPU we selected wouldn't help, obviously).As far as virtualization, I thought that was the CPU that handled that. I wasn't aware of any limitations with 890GX not supporting virtualization. It appears that the IOMMU isn't virtualized except in 890FX, which isn't a problem with Xen, Hyper-V or VMware ESX but prevents its use with WinXP Mode on Win7.
Honestly, I hear about Virtual WinXP in Win7 so often that it's really quite surprising, as I don't know of a single person who uses it. I'm sure businesses do, but do home users really care? I have been using Vista on my machines since 2007, and outside of a few 64-bit compatibility issues (which have since been solved with updated applications), I haven't had any apps that didn't run properly. Who is actually using this (which means you need to buy Win7 Business or Ultimate... a small minority of home users), and what are they using it for? It just seems like something 99.99% of people won't ever use.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Let me rephrase that, the midrange is the typical pc a consumer buys with a specific goal in mind. What the average person with (game-)performance in mind buys, thats what I call midrange.But anyway, why would de motherboard be the most important part? There is barely any difference between specific motherboard, except for some very specific features that most of the people don't need. When looking at motherboards, performance is a non-issue, there is barely any difference. The only difference is features, but what are features that are so important that you need to have them, but not important enough so that not all motherboards have them? (And no, I'm not stating that any motherboard is ok, I just wouldn't know.)
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
And damn it's annyong that there is no "edit" button.Anyway, if everything is a drop-in replacement, than what is the point in making a guide at all?
(Though again, let it be clear, I really like the effort that is put in these articles, but there is a fundamental flaw with these guides, almost any guide. And that is that every person has different needs and the persons who can adapt these configs to their needs are often the persons who actually don't need a guide, while the ones who can use a guide very often don't know anything about it and what to and what not to replace.)
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Once you select and install a motherboard, upgrading it down the road is really a PITA. Motherboard choice determines many of your core features, and while performance rarely varies much between brands, quality and stability (as well as overclocking and memory support) really differentiate the boards. If you only want to run stock, an inexpensive ECS board will probably work fine. Then again, I've seen a lot of inexpensive boards die after a couple years of use, while higher quality boards can last 5+ years.If you want to upgrade the HDD, GPU, RAM, or DVD you can do so in a matter of minutes. (If you have to clone the HDD to another drive, it will take a lot longer, but mostly you're waiting to copy files from one drive to the other.) If you need to upgrade the motherboard, it's pretty much like building a system from scratch.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Ok, well yes, that's a fact, I forget that there are the really cheap brands. What I'm more interested in, usually when assembling a pc I go for the cheapest ATX motherboard from a decent brand (Gigabyte, Asus, ...) with a decent chipset. I've always thought that there is barely any difference between the motherboards within the same brand (Gigabyte f.e.) when looking at performance AND quality, and only in features. (Most people don't need the features of the 790GX f.e.)So example: Before the 880-chipset from AMD I would've went for the cheapest (f.e.) Gigabyte 785G motherboard when assembling an AMD system. (Only checking for crossfire possibilities if wanted and ofcourse if nothing was odd with it.)
Any comments on that way of selecting a motherboard? (I'm just hoping to learn from it. :) )
Thanks a lot for the information already. I hope I did not offend with my comments, their just my opinions. ;)
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Really, it depends on two things: how demanding you are... and luck. LOL. Sometimes you can get a cheap board that's absolutely rock solid, and other times you get a piece of crap that never seems to work quite right. Some boards have compatibility issues with some brands of RAM, USB peripherals, etc. The major brands (ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI...) tend to be safe, but even then there's the occasional lemon. Best way to avoid getting burned IMO is to not buy a board until it has been out at least 2-3 months, and then read a few reviews and see what users are saying. Few boards are perfect, so for instance anything at Newegg with a 4 or 5 rating is typically fine.michal1980 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
When are you anandtech Guru's going to get realistic with power supplies.from the grahpics card artile linked here, the system with thr 5850 peaked at ~ 310 Watts. Why do you recommend a PSU for 2x that load?
GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
+1, 500-550W is more than enough here. This is a third source freeing up money for an SSD, or even 2R0 SSD, wich will actually make a huge difference in user experience.bennyg - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Because PSU wattage ratings are a totally fail way to judge themthe higher the capacity: the less utilised it is during operation, the cooler it stays during operation, the more efficient it is, the longer it will last, the more room to upgrade in the future you will have, the better class of components are used in its manufacture. In general.
Of course there's a huge problem with yumcha "750W" PSUs which have stupidly high 3.3V/5V rails but are sadly lacking where it's actually needed - the 12V rail. But they are not the price that's listed in this article.
But marketing-by-misleading-specifications seems to be well represented in all hardware component markets (GTX260M anyone...)
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
On the other hand, most pc's are idle or on low load for most of the time. Account for the fact that under 20% load the efficiency of a PSU drop dramaticly, your better of with a PSU of less watt. At 100% load a PSU is still very efficient. Look at the 80Plus bronze rating: 82% @ 20%, 85% @ 50% and 82% at 100%.Less utilized percentage wise, isn't per definition a good thing.
Also it will last just as long. I mean, nobody said you have to find a PSU that exactly matches your maximum load. If the 310Watt load is correct, then 750Watt is almost 2.5 times what is needed. Even with 500 Watts you have quite a huge reserve.
And you also totally contradict yourself. You state: "Because PSU wattage ratings are a totally fail way to judge them" and then you state why higher is supposably better. If you want the better quality, buy a 500Watt PSU at the same price of the average 700Watt PSU, than you'll have a quality one.
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
The 50% argument is just silly. I can imagine that all PSU builders, because they know alot of us speak that way,, are doing their best to keep their PSU's performing just like that. With a meager 2% better efficiency at te "sweet spot". Really, what a fuss about a meager 2% difference between 50 and 80% . Atleast, that's what you see with the better brands. Look at the number, Silentpcreviews. They say it all!Most good Quality PSU stay perfectly fine up and around 80% of their rated power. So a HX750 for example, can deliver 600watts (output) , at the wall that "would be around 700watt" (input). It gets a litte hotter and the fan is spinning a little harder then. So what ? That's exactly what a PSU is supposed to do!
That's exaclty what i expect from a "high quality" PSU, for which you payed a premium price.
I remember the day, i was running a fat setup, with a meager "soso quality" Aopen 350watt. Others would not believe me, it worked day and night, rock solid en never broke down on me. No, you know what it is ?
FEAR! Fear for the unknown. It's easy to make people scared when they know shit about PSU's.
Brands are guilty too, mostly the cheaper brands. With their overrated PSU's and poor quality.
When i buy a Seasonix X-750 you can bet i will make it swett. Not too much, but enough to give the feeling i didn't put a V8 engine on my bycicle.
michal1980 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
where did I say to go with a crappy PSU. You could get a good quality PSU for less money then this with less wattage, that will for the overall system be far more efficent, and more importantly sufficent.Mid-Range PC's imho, are all about Bang for the buck. The 750W PSU used in this example fails that test.
mcnabney - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Ahm, you don't know how power supplies work, do you?They are by far most efficient operating around 3/4 load and are in fact DESIGNED to run at that constant load.
GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
So using your own estimation, the optimal load for a PSU is rougly 75%, lower means cooler and more silent but less efficient.The build in question has full load peak power draw roughly 350W from the wall socket. Idle likely under 100W.
750W: optimal efficiency at 750*0,75 = 562W, overshooting by 562/350=1,6x=60%
idle load: <100/750 = 13%, wastefull?
500W: optimal efficiency at 500*0,75 = 375W, overshooting by 375/350=1,06=6%, close to optimal.
idle load: <100/500 = 20%, less wastefull yet still cool at idle fan speed?
Exodite - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Actually it's even less than that as the rated wattage and load level refer to output wattage and load, not input wattage.JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
And despite all this discussion, we already mentioned the potential to downgrade the PSU on page 4:" Those looking to run a lower spec PSU with a single GPU will be fine with the little brother of our recommended PSU, the CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W. Priced at $50 (with a $10 MIR), it should be more efficient when your system is idle while still providing enough juice for the 5850. If you are thinking about going the Clarkdale route and/or a less powerful GPU, then we'd definitely recommend the 400W PSU as a more sensible choice. Just don't try running SLI/CrossFire setups."
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
Yes, and the 400watt is only just enough and leave hardly any room for future singlecard upgrades, or a few harddisks for a raid mode. Around 500watt would be optimal for this config and a single videocard.aftereview - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Normally power supply efficiency is rated at close to full load. This means running a power supply outside that range is actually less efficient.At a lower load although it will draw less power and generate less heat in an absolute sense, it will draw more power and generate more heat PER watt.
Now take a 750W and a 500W (similar design) both running at say 400W, generally the 500W will be more efficient, thus draw less and run cooler.
More is better is not necessarily true and too many people seem to forget that.
Your math is correct but the basis for your conclusions is not.
A power supply should be rated to cover the Peak power of the system with a continuous rating close to that of the system.
The power supply chosen for this article happens to have a 80plus rating at 20%, 50% and 80% load (mfg. spec.) which definitely make it suitable for the built. As some other people pointed out, a less expensive unit/lower power would work as well.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Some of what you say is actually incorrect. At pretty much any load, a 750W PSU will be quieter than a 500W PSU, because it's not reaching the limits of its design. Also, at 400W load, the 750W will be in the range of maximum efficiency (using 53% of its rated output) while the 500W will be heating up more and running at lower efficiency (80% of maximum output). The 80Plus specs maximum efficiency at 50% load, and while the 500W will be more efficient at 100W loads, once you get to 350W the 750W will be more efficient (unless you're comparing a crappy 750W to a good 500W of course).Also note that at idle power draw of around 100W (give or take), the 500W at 80% efficiency would be using 125W; if the 750W is 70% efficient, it's using 142W. Bump power draw up to 400W and if the 500W is now 82% compared to 85% you're looking at 488W vs. 470W. Basically, you're trading lower power draw at idle for higher power draw at load. But you'll also have a noisier system at load with the 500W, as all PSUs pretty much start ramping fan speed quickly beyond 50% load.
So given the choice, I'd stick a 750W into an upper midrange system, simply because it runs quieter and leaves room to grow (i.e. a second GPU could be added). But, if you know you're never going to add a second GPU or heavily overclock I'd stick with a 500W (as recommended in the text).
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
-This system eats aorund 300, not 400watt.-A good psu can cope with a littel heat
-at 300 watt, the 500watt also makes hardly more noise
Three invalid arguments in a row. Need i say more.
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
I mean your arguments, not mine.Yours are flawed, based on 400watts at load.
Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
No, good psu ramping up around 60/70%. Besides, that's what a fan is for, spinning. Noise become nasty, around or above 80%. Below that, most good psu's stay very silent.Futhermore, often you will not even notice it while alot of people are a playing a game at that point and
you can imagine what makes the most noise....
GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Like my subject title saysI'm so upset now i find it physically challenging to sit still and type.
WHY ON EARTH do you not include an SSD in a $1500+ build in 2010??? But you include BluRay???
Sollution #1:
Remove Bluray, add random dvd burner (if needed) and an Intel x25-V for OS + core apps.
This will roughly double the PCmark vantage score of the machine, and make a serious increase in value.
Sollution #2:
Remove Bluray, downgrade from 5850OC to 5830 (or 5770 for "good enough" instead of best graphics), add random dvd burner (if needed) and an Intel x25-M G2 80GB for OS + apps. This give much greater value, as the 5830 can run all the same games at a slightly lower framerate for $100 less, possibly with a step down in resolution or particle/HDR/texture/AA/AF.
I will speculate the only reason this article got posted and not corrected in the editorial is because Anand is out of the country. I am seriously disappointed such an article was posted on Anandtech.
HotFoot - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I love my SSD, but I wouldn't give up graphics performance for it. It boils down to what you're building the machine to do.There just isn't a one-size-fits-all, especially at this price point. If we were talking sub-$500 machines, then basically you're already assuming mostly browsing, media, productivity and some very light gaming. However, $1700 means a serious investment.
Boiling things down even further, let's say we're talking about a gaming machine. Even then, it's hard to define the meaning of value for graphics cards. Basically, what I want is a card that will power though a certain library of my favourite games, plus what might come out over the next year or two - at the graphics settings I want, and at playable frame-rates or better. If saving 50% on the graphics card means a 20% drop in performance, that might be looked at as a good value savings. On the other hand, if that 20% drop in performance means I'm turning down graphics settings or dealing with poor frame rates, my gaming experience is annoyingly diminished. And, in the end, I've only saved about 8% of the total system cost and given up 20% performance.
I absolutely agree, though, that the blu-ray player doesn't make sense for the kind of computing/gaming these systems seem to be designed to do.
PreacherEddie - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I do not understand why some get so bent out of shape at you offering some suggestions to people on how to build a balanced system at a certain price range. What does it matter what label you call it, if you clearly explained the price point you are shooting for (which you did)?Also, you explained various options to up- or down-grade various components to improve performance or save money depending on some of the various circumstances that people may find themselves in when they are building for themselves. So why do some get so upset when it is not the perfect system for them?
And finally, if you know exactly what you want, why are you reading this article? This article is for those, like me, who do not know exactly what they want, and appreciate the guidance from those who have some experience with a lot of the various options out there.
My only complaint is that I would like to see these guides more often, but I can understand the hesitation of the staff at AT to do these since they get blasted every time they do one. Anyway, thanks to Mike and Jarred for doing this.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I'm nog saying that it is a bad guide. I'm just stating that it is very odd not to choose for an ssd. Especially because you can do so without increasing the price (by a lot). Look at the changes I suggested for example.It's not about getting upset because it's not the best system for me. It's just that I expect a buyer's guide to be as optimal as possible, and perhaps offer some alternative routes for special occasions. Now they take a special occasion (blu-ray), and advice a little bit on a better way.
The only reason I, and probably the others as well, are stating these things are that we want to improve this guide. Everybody's cricitcs try to make improvements without increasing the cost OR try to lower the cost of the system, how can you complain about such a thing?
I help out quite a lot of people that are building a system. That's why I care btw. I want them to buy a pc that's best for their needs.
jimhsu - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I think the main problem is that the system proposed is a midrange GAMING system, not a midrange WORKSTATION. Large difference there,GAMING systems do not benefit that much from a SSD (I have one, and I know that load times are not affected much, aside from exceptions such as MMORPGs). Games such as Crysis have almost a 0% boost in loading time on a SSD on most systems. Thus a gamer would probably opt for a more powerful graphics card instead of the cost of a SSD (or for that matter, the Bluray drive ... *sigh*).
There is no freaking way that a WORKSTATION needs a 5850, even if you do some fairly intense gaming on your off time. A 5770 or something is still an incredibly strong card and saves you 100. Or get a last gen card (4870/4890) and get even FASTER performance for cheaper. (You also wouldn't need the Bluray drive, and could save some $$$ on the power supply, and on your yearly electric bill). Case in point: I still have a 8800 GTS 512MB, and it's still decent on almost everything in 16x10, though for a new build I'd like something faster. That money would of course go into a SSD which results in a ridiculous boost in productivity.
Another vote for segregation of the two systems?
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
As mentioned, there are so many options that unless we put together half a dozen potential builds and explain each component in detail (which I've done in the past) you're going to gloss over things. From the intro:" Our recommendations today skew pretty heavily toward graphics performance, with the single most expensive part—the factory OCed Gigabyte Radeon HD 5850—comprising approximately 25% of the base system cost (or about 18% of the complete system). Though it may be a little over the top for some, one look at graphics card comparison charts will tell you that things drop off rather precipitously after the 5850, with the drops in performance not corresponding all that sensibly to the drops in price. While there are plenty of less expensive cards that will still deliver acceptable performance—for many, at any rate—none seem to offer as desirable a mix of price, performance and future proofing (DX11) as the 5870’s little brother. For our midrange builds today, it feels just about right. If you're not worried about gaming or graphics, feel free to downgrade to something else, but we'd recommend sticking with at least an HD 5670 to get all the latest and greatest video decoding and power management features, or grab an HD 5450 if you're willing to skip out on a few extras like vector adaptive deinterlacing. Or if you don't care about DX11 right now and think CUDA is more important, you might prefer the GT 240."
I could have added another paragraph just as long in the intro discussing the pros/cons of SSDs. Pro: fast. Con: small capacity and an order of magnitude more expensive per GB. Blu-ray was something Mike put in, and I have no reason to remove it, though obviously that's an easy thing to do. Of course, it's also easy to add an SSD down the road, clone your main HDD over to it (well, that might take a bit more effort), and go on your merry way. Ultimately, it's different strokes for different folks. I'll take the higher GPU over an SSD any day of the week on a desktop, because I still enjoy games.
GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
IMHO, it could be summarized as easy as:*Hardcore gamer / upper mid-end gaming rigg: 5850OC.
*Casual/hobby gamer using the computer for other stuff a couple of hours a day: 5830 + x25-V (OS + core apps) in addition to the HDD (maybe downgrade HDD to Green to make back some cache when/if the IOPS requirements are off-loaded to the SSD.
*Productivity, using the computer mainly for workstation (and/or office) type things, with a couple of hours casual gaming now and then: 5770 + X25-M 80GB.
None of the above warrants a BD reader.
Possible reason for BD reader: high-end HTPC, or fileserver/workstation ripping BD videos. If neither of theese 2 are met, BD is a complete waste of money and you should go for DVD burner instead ($25).
jimhsu - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Right, no criticism intended at the article, but the above is a more reasonable approach towards designing system configurations that actually suits different groups of people. Like it or not, not all users are the same. Neither should the system design for the users be the same.It wouldn't even lengthen the article much to include a few alternatives. For instance, the core components (i7-750, motherboard, RAM (though some may object to 4GB, but whatever), case, fan, etc) are all solid, but obviously the rest of the system is amenable to tweaking. You obviously shown that you could give alternatives - i.e. discussion of motherboard choices, video card choice, etc. It wouldn't be that hard to put in a few more itemized tables as potential variants of the midrange system.
Voo - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
That's a rather black and white approach to the whole thing. Just because I work a lot on my PC I can't also want a good high end gaming PC? Does that mean that everyone who works isn't allowed to play anymore? ;)Most people will want to do more than just one thing on their PC: playing BRs (well I don't need that, but I'm sure there are people out there who do), playing and working. So one balanced build really isn't that bad, as long as you mention (or it's obvious) what you can leave away if you don't do XY.
The only thing is that a SSD is a great investment for most things you want to do with your PC (well at least if you consider spending more than 1k$ on one), so the extra added paragraph really is a good idea. We can still argue if you need one or not, but it surely warrants that discussion, so it can be a bit more prominently mentioned.
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
(Note: Responding to the thread and not necessarily to the post right above mine. Heh)Ultimately, an SSD is about adding performance but it doesn't improve the features or capabilities of a system in any way. A Blu-ray reader does exactly one thing that a non-BR drive can't do. Surprisingly, that one thing is reading Blu-ray discs. If you want to watch Blu-ray movies (or rip them for storage on your 1TB HDD and later viewing over the network on your living room HTPC), that can be a very useful one thing.
An SSD will only improve certain usage patterns, and personally most of those usage patterns don't apply to me, particularly on my desktop. My system is generally on during the day, with email, office, internet, Photoshop, and Explorer windows open. They are usually open all the time, so I don't need to wait for the apps to load. With 4GB RAM, I also don't tend to run out of memory and have to go to the swap file. I turn on my system once in the morning and shut it down once at night. I can hit the power button, walk away, and come back 5 minutes later and never know that the HDD was thrashing during that time. Which is exactly what I do. (Technically I sleep the computer at night and wake it up in the morning, so it's more like 30-45 seconds of HDD thrashing.)
With everything I need available, the only time I really feel the HDD slowness is if I play games. Load a game, and an SSD might load it a fraction faster, but as someone else mentioned, getting into a round of L4D2 faster usually just means waiting an extra 5-10 seconds for the guy(s) with slow PCs to load the level. And shaving 5 seconds off a level load time when I'm then going to play that level for 10-20 minutes represents a very small amount of lost "productivity". Of course, we're talking about using a 32GB SSD as an OS+Apps drive, so I couldn't really fit more than a couple games on it anyway and more likely all my games would still come off the HDD.
Are there instances where SSDs truly make their presence known? Of course. Heavy multitasking, launching seven apps at once, start up and resume times, and situations where you access tons of small files randomly. I'm not sure how often I actually do any of those, hence my feeling that for 45X the cost per GB (roughly... a 1.5TB drive costs about as much as a 32GB SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... and http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8... those situations where the SSD is 50X as fast don't come into play all that often. In short, measuring a dramatic improvement in benchmarks that stress the storage subsystem isn't the same as delivering a huge real-world improvement in performance and usability.
DynacomDave - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Well said! Those are my sentiments exactly. I have enough knowledge to get myself in trouble and rely on the recommendations of AnandTech to avoid making big mistakes. I look forward to all of their guides and recommendations.Benoit_P - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
To the Anandtech team:I wish you would update the "Sub-1000$ System Guide" given the latest AMD cpu and chipset release.
BP
Belard - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Maybe back 10~12 years ago, $1700 could be considered a mid-range computer... but not today.What I consider:
$400~500 = Office / basic computers (does Word, internet just fine) - AMD typical X2 CPU.
$600~700 = Basic Gaming system with a 5600 or 5700 series video card and a sub $100 AMD CPU.
$700~999 = Mid-Range gaming PC... this CAN be a system with a 5850 card, easily.
$1000~$1800 = top end, dual video card systems for uber gamers.
Also $700~1200 for higher end desktop systems with hybrid drive arrangements (SSD boot & application drive + HDD for games & data).
In the real world, as shown on this site and others. The difference in gaming performance between a $65 AMD X2 CPU and a $950 i7-Quad is about 25% when both are using a top end video card. Go with a $150~180 AMD X4 CPU - and that difference in performance is closer to 5~10% slower.
Rather pocket the money, put it towards an SSD or bigger monitor, go out on a date, etc.
justaviking - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
This was a PERFORMANCE Midrange buyer's guide, not a midrange "value" or "budget" system. As such, there is still lots of opportunity to spend more money, even without it turning into a "dream" system.Notice it has an i5, not an i7 Intel CPU.
Notice it has a $310 graphics card, not a $500 graphics card.
Notice it has 4GB of memory, not 8.
Notice it has a Bluray player, not a burner.
There has been some good debate, especially about Bluray and SSD trade offs. But take a chill pill. There's no need to be hostile. No need to be defensive. I'll bet no two people at AnandTech even agree on one of these articles.
racerx_is_alive - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
This falls pretty squarely in the Midrange Gaming PC category. Probably not a midrange PC in general, but it matches up pretty well pricewise with other guides across the internet. For example at Tom's Hardware, they have 3 Gaming builds: Budget at $750, Midrange at $1500, and Extreme at $3000. So $1700 isn't out of line for a midrange build. I don't think this system gives you the best bang for your buck necessarily, but that's another topic completely.That being said, I agree with the blu-ray/SSD comments above. At this time, I don't see how a blu-ray drive is necessary in anything other than HTPC builds.
Krofojed - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Blu-ray makes it possible for your computer to do something that it otherwise couldn't - namely watch blu-ray movies. SSD does no such thing, although I have no doubt that it's a nice thing to have. I'm not saying the suggested configuration is optimal (and I'm not saying it isn't), but choosing blu-ray over SSD is hardly a reason for apoplexy.GullLars - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Considering it's a "Performance midrange" and not a "high-end HTPC", an SSD for os + (core) apps makes a lot more sense. The system will always feel snappy, and all programs will load nearly instantly even if you multitask like crazy and copy files while doing a virus scan. Even during light disk impacting multitasking (virus scan, updates, or file copy in the background while attempting to interact with the system), a WD black will slow to a crawl.I would, whitout any doubt, list BD as an optional upgrade if you intent to watch BD movies on the PC. If not, it's a notable waste of money, and is a piece of hardware that will serve no purpose most of the time.
32GB is enough for Windows 7 (64bit, any edition), office suite, other "office" type apps, antivirus, HTPC type apps, and small usefull programs (i have done this on 3 computers, so i'd know). For a couple of larger apps (like CS4 suite), 40GB should be enough. For a higher number of larger apps and app suites, an 80GB SSD could be considered if placing the least used large apps on a short-stroke partition on a "green" HDD doesn't yield acceptable performance for those apps.
I use 64GB for OS + apps + games myself, and my best friend also does so. A third friend uses 80GB, and i helped a girl i know set up a 40GB for W7 + apps. None of them have complained about space, but loved the speed and said "It was totally worth it" and "i'm never going back to HDD for OS".
wicko - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I could never, with a straight face, recommend getting a bluray reader. Just for the sole reason that pretty much all bluray playback software is garbage, and you'd be better off getting a bluray burner (perhaps when they are more affordable) or a dedicated bluray player. Unless you absolutely need a bluray reader, I think we could all do without it. Bluray burner makes more sense, 25GB+ data discs can be incredibly useful. Same with bluray authoring. But playback, until we see open source playback software I can't recommend paying for bluray playback software.Jediron - Tuesday, May 18, 2010 - link
I don't need a blueray player to watch blueray, what a silly idea...loldarckhart - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
1700 is NOT midrange. "performance" moniker or not.GeorgeH - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Firstly, the article format and layout are excellent and vast improvements over past articles. You've done a lot of work there and it shows.Secondly, the build in the article isn't bad at all, but here's how I'd do it:
1) Drop the BluRay. Unless you're watching BluRay's on your PC (why?) or ripping them to a media server, it's a pointless expense and people who know they need one can figure it out on their own. Savings: ~$90.
2) Stick with the OEM CPU cooler. From the other components this isn't going to be a silent build, and the people who are going to overclock should know enough to figure out what they want. Savings: ~$30.
3) Go with higher quality 2.1 speakers. 5.1 is great for headphones, but setting up 5 speakers around the typical PC station is a PITA that typically yields substandard results when compared to a quality 2.1 setup unless you're an audio geek. Savings: ~$0.
4) Get a cheaper ~400-500W PSU. 750W is incredible overkill for this build. Savings: ~$40.
5) $310 is too much for a video card for all but an incredibly small subset of the population. With 95% of AAA titles being console ports that can easily be played maxed out on a <$200 video card, the days of beastly PC cards like the 5850 being all that relevant are over for the time being. Savings: ~$110.
I just saved you $300 without even trying hard. Buy some games, upgrade your monitor and case so they'll last for your next build, or just pocket the difference.
Jellodyne - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I actually have that mainboard in my system, and while it's a great board it's NOT a good choice for Crossfire. The secondary PCI-E slot is a 4X slot off of the south bridge (as opposed to the higher performance on-die PCI-E controller of the i750), and it runs with a 2.5 GHz base clock, not 5 GHz which is half the speed of a standard PCI-E 3.0, so in terms of bandwidth you should think of it as a 2X slot. It will work, but it's ugly, and I suspect a 2x slot is going to drop a huge performance penalty, even for a pair of 5850s.There are P55 boards out there which can split the on-die PCI-E controller into two proper 8x lanes in crossfire mode, which is actually plenty of bandwidth to drive even a pair of 5970s without issues.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
You mean like we mentioned in the text?"The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 is a feature-rich option... If you want to enable both USB3 and SATA6, the primary GPU slot will drop down to x8 speed, while the secondary x16 slot always runs at x4 bandwidth. For the price, however, it's a very good board and it has good overclocking abilities if you're interested.... If you prefer higher performance CrossFire/SLI, and you want Firewire, look at the MSI P55-GD65."
I'll clarify the paragraph by pointing out explicitly that the MSI board does x8/x8 for CF/SLI instead of x16/x4.
jleach1 - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
You're a smart guy Jarred. I like it.Jellodyne - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
No NOT like it says in the text. The text is wrong. The text says the secondary works at 4x bandwidth. But it doesn't. It IS in fact a 4x slot but it's a HALF SPEED 4x slot, so it's REALLY 2X bandwidth.4X bandwidth would probably be enough for crossfire, 2x bandwidth is really unacceptable. Which is why I'm objecting to this board as a good choice for someone considering crossfire in the future. It's in fact a really bad choice if you're considering crossfire.
But it's still a great board if you have no interest in crossfire.
ekoostik - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Great guide. But one clarification. The article states "The Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 is a feature-rich option for the builder who might want CrossFireX or SLI down the road" - but this board isn't licensed for SLI. As far as I'm aware, NVidia won't allow it on any of the x16, x4 boards.JarredWalton - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Thanks... forgot about that. The MSI supports CF/SLI because it does the necessary x8/x8. Outside of SLI support, though, I wouldn't go with the MSI.Lazlo Panaflex - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Adding benchmarks for both systems in the final thoughs section was a nice touch.Also, wonder how much of a performance penalty (if any) there would be using DDR2 w/ Thubian as opposed to DDR3?
Ninjahedge - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Guys, the arguments over semantics are petty.This is at the upper range of mid, with many options listed in the article to reduce price.
If you DON'T OC, and only are using 1 card (no sli) then you can drop the PS, get rid of the cooler and save possibly $50 right off the bat.
Other cards were mentioned as well, dropping it even further, depending on your need for Gaming Speed.
As others have mentioned, a Blu-Ray may not be needed, dropping that $105 down to a $25 LG. We are already getting down to $1000 for a full box here.
Now, taking those parts and using your own KB, HD, DVD, Vid Card and other parts from your current machine (if you feel like it) can easily drop this down to $700 or less. You can then upgrade, piece by piece, until you get what you want at the price you want.
As for SSD? I have been watching those. the performance is great, granted, but that only comes with loading or transcoding, not with many apps for buisness, or in-game situations (Wow, you loaded up the board the quickest! You can now wait 47 seconds for everyone else to join!!!!).
You can always upgrade later. Storage is one of the most fickle price points on the market, excluding Vid Cards. A wait of 6 months may bring you 2X the capacity for the same price.
it is also kind of odd with people screaming about "THIS IS NOT MIDRANGE" and others screaming for an SSD.... I think the fact that there are both means you (the original writer) probably hit a good sweet spot in between!
Maybe instead of classifying them as "midrange", a different nomenclature should be used. Just state the price ranges and what they are built for rather than deciding what people should see them as.
This is in the range of a $1000-$1500 box. It is geared for performance, so maybe "$1000-$1500 performance Machine" and shut all the complainers up.....
Last point, when machines can be built for $500 all included, or $3000 for close to TOTL, screamiming that $1700 is not midrange is just plain silly.
Ditiris - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I'm just going to chime in and suggest losing the Blu-Ray. You don't really justify the necessity for it, and your other choice of components, in particular the overclocked graphics card and bargain 5.1 speakers, make clear the case for this being a gaming machine. So, I would suggest losing the Blu-Ray for the next go-around, which I'm eager to see. Thanks for the article guys.Fastidious - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I'd almost call anything with a 5850 high end nowadays for gaming anyways. Personally I am going to wait until I can put all of my programs, OS, games, etc I use on an affordable SSD to me before I get one($300 for 300gb sounds about right). I think having some stuff on an SSD and some not would bug me a lot more than just sticking to HDs like I do now. I also agree Blu-ray to me still seems very niche but it makes sense for the future to get it now even if it's a bit expensive.knofix - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I cant figure out what the target audience is for these systems. (OK maybe MAC buyers, since these two systems fall into their price range and maybe the nobrainer-rich kid with lots of dosh to spare)PC gamers would opt for better CPUs and SLI/CF perhaps, audio enthusiasts would sneer at the speakers (they are utter crap, usable for video streams with 5.1 channel sound yes, but they just massacre the audio files in stereo (so do 2.1)), media coders would be satisfied with the 6core and so would creative artists, although I think they would pick double the CPU power these 2 configurations have to offer and be satisfied with the GPU at hand (since Adobe loves GPUs now) but all of the above mentioned groups would hang you for only including 4GB of RAM. All of these groups of users would benefit from having a SSD.
So all of these guys are mid/high end users. And none of those would pick the configuration you bungled up. Verdict - FAIL
Since me being from the EU, I cant possibly imagine how much these two systems would cost here. OK I can. Price x 1.3, lets call it 2K Euros - btw. that would be the equivalent of an OVERKILL systems price in EU. (lets skip the wealthy minority and focus on real people - that is what mainstream means I guess).
killerclick - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I hate poor people whining all the time about how they can't afford this or that.Anyone know where I can get a diamond encrusted laser mouse?
Ditiris - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Pretty sure Razer makes that.
Setsunayaki - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I'm sorry, but most players play games that are 3 - 5 years old and enjoy playing them. They play the occassional new game out there. Sorry,. but the top games are played by such a marginally low population. I'm part of a gaming club that is linked to other gaming clubs in the state and recently the majority of gamers out there were not playing Crysis or Batman.I still have an older system and with my configuration at 1900 x 1200 (and higher resolutions) play top games. Only lackluster thing in here is my aging video card, but for the most part I can get a stable to good framerate.
The majority of people that I know swiched from PC to XBOX360 in order to play games. They don't want to be troubled with frequent upgrading and only care about just playing game. I personaly do not own next generation consoles, but I know many who have made the switch back to consoles lately....
Majority of computer users are not gamers, they do basic things and I can build a system for basics that is $200 - $300, While a lot of parents do not want their kids messing around their hard earned PCs, so they buy them consoles. Until the industry can make enough software and not just enough to count on my fingers....the majority wont care about the highest end software out there...or even the latest action games when anyone can buy a console and be littered with them.
Polizei608 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Maybe it's midrange because the person who got it was-MAAAAAAAAAAAAIKKKKKKKKKKKKE JONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNES
numberoneoppa - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
lol'd hard.skrewler2 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
might want to fix thatFrostburn - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
What is up with the horrible picture for this post? For a moment I thought it was a joke from your very first System Buyer's Guide or something, the worst looking case I've ever seen and a 7 year old 4:3 LCD monitor!Just about anything call fall into the "Midrange" category unless it is the fastest and most expensive parts out there. The system looks more expensive because they are buying a new monitor, keyboard, mouse, surround sound setup and a new OS to go with it. Most PC builders will already have/keep most of this stuff the same when they upgrade their system.
Furuno - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
First, I agree it is a midrange from performance perspective, as high end should at least have a "reasonable" i7 and "sane" CF/SLI setup. But please (again) consider that AnandTech is an international website, a midrange system should be (relatively) affordable by most people. Most people in my country even think my $1000 system is "crazy". I know we're might be the minority, but please consider this. Maybe using price range instead of Low/Mid/High moniker...Since most of the people that read AT is tech enthusiast and usually buld their own system. I'd like more "roundups" with (if possible) every component available for each category. For example, roundups of every motherboard with 890GX chipset, not just a "select" model.
Oh and, why you never metion about "other" SSD that exist beside Intel/Indilinx/Crucial/SandForce? What about those Imation/A-Data/Sandisk/etc SSD? Is they're any good?
Best Regards,
Furuno
GullLars - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
I'm guessing you mean SSD controllers. Imitation uses Mtron controllers, they are older generation and use SLC only. I have 2 of these Mtron Pro SSDs in RAID from back in 2008 before Intel were avalible. They work well, but they behave a bit different from the new SSDs. For one, Mtron SSD don't support NCQ, they have really low read latency, but fairly low random write (roughly 200-250 IOPS, about the same as a 15K SAS HDD whitout NCQ or shortstroke). In everyday use, they are comparable to Indilinx drives, but are more expensive. The pluss is they have no performance degradation whatsoever. Mine perform just as new after soon 2 years in RAID-0 as a much used system drive.
SanDisk SSDs i don't know a lot about, i haven't seen any info outside marketing campaings. The "vRPM" scheme is a farce. Their netbook replacement drives are likely a bit better than the ones they come with, but nothing like Intel or SandForce.
You also have Adtron SSDs, but i don't know if those are on the market anymore.
JMicron is a controller producer you didn't mention. Their early controllers had major issues with random writes. The new generation, JMF612/618(aka thosiba) have gotten it under controll, but are still limited by not using NCQ. They can be considered low-end. WD has made custom firmware for a line using JMF612 focusing on realiability.
Memoright are also a controller producer, but as far as i know, they only made one model. It was the best consumer SSD out there before Intel, but cost the double of Mtron, wich weren't cheap either (I gave about $1500 for my 2x 32GB Mtrons...).
Samsung has made SSD controllers. They have been OK at sequential performance, but sub-par on random performance. The last controller thay made came out about the same time as Indilinx Barefoot, over a year ago. Indilinx clearly beat it at performance. I haven't heard anything about new controllers from them, but they have invested in (not bought) Fusion-IO, wich makes the most powerfull flash SSD controllers i know of.
The other SSD controllers i know of are exclusively used in the enterprise, like STec, BitMicro, Foremay, TMS, Fusion-IO, etc.
Makaveli - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
This article was fine the rest of you guy should stick to buying Best buy PC'sI also found this hilarious
"$1000~$1800 = top end, dual video card systems for uber gamers."
A top end gaming PC is $2000-$5000 range!
thanks for the write up Mike and Jarred!
ereavis - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Why would you not go with the more modern WD1002FAEX with twice the cache? If you had to spend $10 more at all, it's on sale at $100 every other weekgeokilla - Saturday, May 15, 2010 - link
$1700 is not midrange... And with $1700 I can get a Core i7 build instead. Come on guys.P.S. I'm Canadian so things are more expensive up here.
Navitron - Sunday, May 16, 2010 - link
I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that writer of this article is mainly a mac user.Heres a system I specced out in 10 min on newegg, Core i7 with an SSD for $1,700.
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail...
(Prices on newegg as of 5/16 9:14 PM PST $1,723.84)
7Enigma - Monday, May 17, 2010 - link
I'm sick of reading through all of these comments complaining about what $1700 means. Here's a recommendation to avoid this in the future: just drop the name.System Buyer's Guide: $1700
Done. No more whiners with nothing better to do than complain that this is/isn't midrange, and instead focus on the actual part recommendations themselves. That's the point of the article!
Highlander944 - Wednesday, May 19, 2010 - link
Ok..I tend to agree with others who've posted that $1700 is NOT midrange. This is certainly upper mid range since performance increases from here are marginal at best and $1700 bucks is a good deal of money.
Next, what's with the benchmarks? I mean seriously. Your recommending a "system" why in the world would you bench the graphics at anything but native resolution of the LCD? The gaming benchmarks are utterly useless! Who is gonna lay out that kind of money for the 'system' and not game at 1900x1200? The only reason to not game there is if you can't... which we don't know because you didn't bench that!
shamans33 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
1) Articles needs a title change: Something like "Mid-High End Gaming Machine"2) The system isn't $1700...it's $1182.
3) 5850 is high end. Seriously, a $300 graphics card is high end.
4) PSU is overkill.
5) CPU is borderline high end.
This machine seems a tad expensive for a midrange gaming machine.
People who take your advice literally might think that a mid-end gaming machine is expensive @ nearly $1200. You can practically play any game and/or do anything with this machine....the only limitations are 4 GB of ram and non-SSD storage.
shamans33 - Thursday, May 20, 2010 - link
Might be nice to start seeing a mini itx buyer's guide.MEH - Wednesday, May 26, 2010 - link
I used to have time (and enjoy) putting together my own system, but now with 3 kids it's not likely to happen. I also don't like the more generic alternatives at the big PC companies. Are there other companies who will build a system with components I select, maybe similar to what's here in the guide or with other things I choose?MIDIman - Thursday, May 27, 2010 - link
I'm looking at the difference between the i5-750 and the i7-930 routes, and maybe its just me, but doesn't the i7 route make more sense?In both cases the motherboards are almost precisely $200. I'm comparing MSI's USB3-supported motherboards at newegg.
In both cases, the CPUs actually cost the same. I can get the i7-930 from microcenter for $200.
RAM appears to be the only difference, but the difference is much more negligible - $50 maybe?
7Enigma - Monday, October 4, 2010 - link
Just wanted to update this build guide (since it's the last) with some words of caution. I built my dad a rig 4 months ago with many of the parts on this list (actually pretty much all of them). The Gigabyte UD3 mobo was a great piece that after some initial trouble (mobo and case didn't have a speaker so I couldn't hear the beeps) seemed to work great. I left everything at stock speeds since my dad uses this as a gaming rig exclusively and is only on a 24" LCD with the 5850. Since nothing he was playing was taxing the system I left everything stock.So I get a call a couple weeks ago that he was getting a power cycling issue. He tried it the next day and it worked again. 2 weeks later though everything stopped working and it would just cycle on and off....I came over and removed the heatsink and CPU and there was a pin just lying in there disconnected from the mobo!!!
Contacted Gigabyte through newegg.com's reviews and have received no answer from them. To top it off there are a SLEW of 1 and 2 ratings in the last couple months of dead and faulty boards, most with the exact same issues my dad's system had. I'm fine with a defective part, but will not stand for poor/no customer service to make things right.
I've built my last 3 systems with Gigabyte mobo's and loved the frequent bios updates and quality of the boards. But I've had to switch (to an Asus also recommended in this review), and will not be going back unless I see the PR and customer service improve drastically from this company.
You have been warned.
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